Excerpt from Local Government and Free Schools in South Carolina: First Part Read Before the Historical Society of South Carolina, December 15, 1882 The history of the growth of local government in the Southern States presents characteristics which at once distinguish our local unit from that of the Eastern and Western States. In the South the county is the centre of political life. The schools, the roads, the poor, and other local matters are regulated by county officers. In the Eastern States and in many of the States of the Northwest, all such local questions are controlled by the towns or townships. The political activity of Southern communities is, therefore, less minutely subdivided than elsewhere in the United States; and, as a consequence, there is more centralization in the management of local matters. This great difference between the local machinery of the two sections of our country is, at first, very strange to the student of American institutions. And when he recalls the fact that the early settlers of Virginia and the Carolinas came from the same land as did the early settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he is, perhaps, even more impressed with the opposing characteristics of the local institutions of the South and those of the North. The causes of these peculiarities are many. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.