has been made too large altogether.  The average area of the county in South Carolina is about 1,000 square miles.  Charleston County, more than 40 miles in length and not less than 35 in average width, is larger than the state of Rhode Island.  Such an area is much too extensive for local self-government.  Its different portions are too far apart to understand each other’s local wants, or to act efficiently toward supplying them; and roads, bridges, and free schools suffer accordingly.  An unsuccessful attempt has been made to reduce the size of the counties.  But what seems perhaps more likely to happen is the practical division of the counties into school districts, and the gradual development of these school districts into something like self-governing townships.  To this very interesting point we shall again have occasion to refer.

[Sidenote:  The hundred in Maryland.] [Sidenote:  Clans, brotherhoods, and tribes] We come now to Maryland.  The early history of local institutions in this state is a fascinating subject of study.  None of the American colonies had a more distinctive character of its own, or reproduced old English usages in a more curious fashion.  There was much in colonial Maryland, with its lords of the manor, its bailiffs and seneschals, its courts baron and courts leet, to remind one of the England of the thirteenth century.  But of these ancient institutions, long since extinct, there is but one that needs to be mentioned in the present connection.  In Maryland the earliest form of civil community was called, not a parish or township, but a hundred.  This curious designation is often met with in English history, and the institution which it describes, though now almost everywhere extinct, was once almost universal among men.  It will be remembered that the oldest form of civil society, which is still to be found among some barbarous races, was that in which families were organized into clans and clans into tribes; and we saw that among our forefathers in England the dwelling-place of the clan became the township, and the home of the tribe became the shire or county.  Now, in nearly all primitive societies that have been studied, we find a group that is larger than the clan but smaller than the tribe,—­or, in other words, intermediate between clan and tribe.  Scholars usually call this group by its Greek name, phratry or “brotherhood”, for it was known long ago that in ancient Greece clans were grouped into brotherhoods and brotherhoods into tribes.  Among uncivilized people all over the world we find this kind of grouping.  For example, a tribe of North American Indians is regularly made up of phratries, and the phratries are made up of clans; and, strange as it might at first seem, a good many half-understood features of early Greek and Roman society have had much light thrown upon them from the study of the usages of Cherokees and Mohawks.

Wherever men have been placed, the problem of forming civil society has been in its main outlines the same; and in its earlier stages it has been approached in pretty much the same way by all.