We may go further back than this. History tells us that "the boroughs
(towns) of England, during the period of oppression, after the Norman
invasion, led the way in the silent growth and elevation of the English
people; that, unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble, they had
alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty; that, by their
traders and shopkeepers, the rights of self-government, of free speech
in free meeting, of equal justice by one's equals, were brought safely
across the ages of Norman tyranny."[A] The rights of self-government and
free speech in free meeting, then, were rights and practices of our
Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and we are to go back with them across the English
channel to their barbarian German home, and to the people described by
Tacitus in his Germania, for the origin, as far as we can trace it, of
this part of our inheritance. These people were famed for their spirit
of independence and freedom. The mass are described as freemen, voting
together in the great assemblies of the tribe, and choosing their own
leaders or kings from the class of nobles, who were nobles not as
constituting a distinct and privileged caste. "It was their greater
estates and the greater consequence which accompanied these that marked
their rank." When we first learn of these assemblies, they are
out-of-doors, under the broad canopy of heaven alone, but the time came,
as the rathhaus of the German town to-day attests, when they built the
common hall or town-house; and we, to-day, in this remote and then
unknown and unconjectured land of the West, are in this regard their
heirs as well as descendants.[B]

[Footnote A: Green's Short History of the English People, chap. ii, sec.
6.]

[Footnote B: The present rathhaus of the quaint old city of Nuremberg,
built in 1619, is a notable building, much visited by travelers. Around