For a while, too, employers thought it necessary to exercise the
power which their relations with dependent laborers gave them, to
prevent the neglect of agricultural interests for the pursuit of
political knowledge, and especially to prevent absence from the
plantation upon the day of election. After a time, however, it
was found that such care was unnecessary. The laws of the State,
carefully revised by legislators wisely chosen for that purpose,
had taken the power from the irresponsible hands of the masses, and
placed it in the hands of the few, who had been wont to exercise
it in the olden time.
That vicious idea which had first grown up on the inclement shores
of Massachusetts Bay, and had been nourished and protected and
spread abroad throughout the North and West as the richest heritage
which sterile New England could give to the states her sons had
planted; that outgrowth of absurd and fanatical ideas which had made
the North free, and whose absence had enabled the South to remain
"slave"--the township system, with its free discussion of all matters,
even of the most trivial interest to the inhabitants; that nursery
of political virtue and individual independence of character,
comporting, as it did, very badly with the social and political
ideas of the South--this system was swept away, or, if retained in
name, was deprived of all its characteristic elements.
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