Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Origin and Significance of Our Township Names, Vol. 1: No. 7
In the new world, while the township may have been bodily transplanted in a few instances before any higher government was organized, and its local rights and privileges and powers to a certain extent preserved, and while townships, as in the case of our own Lebanon, in many instances preceded the present county, organiza tions, the fact is, that what might theoretically be called the natural order of political development from the individual to the state, was in most instances reversed, and political organization proceeded from the state to the individual. Men came and took possession of the land and formed settlements in the name of the mother country. They did not settle together as so many individual units, organize themselves into a community which grew into an independent local government, that presently sought association and union with similar independent local settle ments, and thus became amalgamated into a larger whole, whether county, state or nation. The larger general government for the most part had already anticipated the other. And while as pennsylvania-germans we delight to trace our descent from the bearded sons of Thuiscon with their fierce blue eyes and to consider the Fatherland as the fountainhead of our civil liberty, the consideration of the relative growth of centralized power with the parallel development of our local and individual rights, in candor and truth compel certain wholesome reflections, to wit: I. That the loyal and redoubtable subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm, so hedged about in their ordinary affairs of everyday life with the arbitrary control of the Polizei that they scarce dare turn around in bed without a police regulation are hardly the people to give us lessons in personal liberty. 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.
