Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

SPRiyOFIELD, 163G-1SS6. 17
was a belief abroad in those times that America was destined to be
a peculiar laud, favored of God, aud mauy of the laws so repuguaut
to modern ideas of freedom aud justice were designed to hasten the
da}^ when tliat liope should be realized.
The coming (jf Mr. Moxon was propitious also, as it occurred at
the season of general thauksgiving through New England at the
overthrow of the Pequots. With all their trials aud anxieties, there
was more blue skj^ than cloud above them, and Agawam observed
October 12, its first day of thanksgiving, with renewed heart and a
hope that could not be subdued.
The records of many of the first town-meetings are unfortunately
lost, aud it is not until the spring of IGoS that we can secure any
definite notion of the course of local legislation. We will, therefore,
only anticipate at this point enough to say that oue meets continually
in these dingy records of the ancient town the reflections of English
methods of local government. Local democracy and the town-
meeting were no invention. Every i)hase of it was more or less a
retlectiou of Englisli civilization. Had it not been for the English
Church in its relations to the 8tate, the New Enoiaud town-meeting
would not have been what it was. Xew-Englandism was, as it were,
an oak-buttressed " L " against the great mansion of English civiliza-
tion. One can even go further, and safely assert that if the first
settlers liad not read the De Moribns ar Populis Gernumi(M of
Tacitus, they certaiuly revealed a contact of some sort with German
folk-life and town-life. Even to this day town connnuuisni retains
its hold upon the Teutonic race. In a recent magazine article on
''Hanoverian Milage Life," we find this passage quite in point:
"The tilled land is very minutely subdivided, the pasturage and
forest lands beiug held and used in common." The management and
allotments of these lauds m Hanover are [)rimarily in the hands of
the farmers, with, of course, a State supervision.
In the English parish of the seventeenth century, whether it had a
civil or religious origin, with l)oth Roman and (rerman marks upon