but a keeping of it back.  The national government says to the local government, whatever revenues may come from that section of 640 acres, be they great or small, be it a spot in a rural grazing district, or a spot in some crowded city, are not to go into the pockets of individual men and women, but are to be reserved for public purposes.  This is a case of disguised taxation, and may serve to remind us of what was said some time ago, that a government cannot give anything without in one way or another depriving individuals of its equivalent.  No man can sit on a camp-stool and by any amount of tugging at that camp-stool lift himself over a fence.  Whatever is given comes from somewhere, and whatever is given by governments comes from the people.  This reservation of one square mile in every township for purposes of education has already most profoundly influenced the development of local government in our western states, and in the near future its effects are likely to become still deeper and wider.  To mark out a township on the map may mean very little, but when once you create in that township some institution that needs to be cared for, you have made a long stride toward inaugurating township government.  When a state, as for instance Illinois, grows up after the method just described, what can be more natural than for it to make the township a body corporate for school purposes, and to authorize its inhabitants to elect school officers and tax themselves, so far as may be necessary, for the support of the schools?  But the school-house, in the centre of the township, is soon found to be useful for many purposes.  It is convenient to go there to vote for state officers or for congressmen and president, and so the school township becomes an election district.  Having once established such a centre, it is almost inevitable that it should sooner or later be made to serve sundry other purposes, and become an area for the election of constables, justices of the peace, highway surveyors, and overseers of the poor.  In this way a vigorous township government tends to grow up about the school-house as a nucleus, somewhat as in early New England it grew up about the church.

[Sidenote:  At first the county system prevailed.] This tendency may be observed in almost all the western states and territories, even to the Pacific coast.  When the western country was first settled, representative county government prevailed almost everywhere.  This was partly because the earliest settlers of the West came in much greater numbers from the middle and southern states than from New England.  It was also partly because, so long as the country was thinly settled, the number of people in a township was very small, and it was not easy to have a government smaller than that of the county.  It was something, however, that the little squares on the map, by grouping which the counties were made, were already called townships.  There is much in a name.  It was still more important that these townships were only six miles square; for that made it sure that, in due course of time, when population should have become dense enough, they would be convenient areas for establishing township government.