Talks on Civics (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: T. Is there no other way in which government affects the value of a man's money ?,,, ., P. Certainly: government manufactures 10. Money., j -r t - j the money, and if it manufactures bad money (as ours has done twice since 1860), a man cannot buy much with it. GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS OF GOVERNMENT. r, ., . .. Teacher. So far you have spoken of gov- 11. Each citizen lives .. . 3 . under several ernment as if it were one organization?as governments. if you lived under but one government. Is that the case ? Pupil. Far from it: Americans generally live under at least four?local, county, state and national. T. How much territory does the local government usually cover ? P. That mainly depends on the thickness of the population. In New England and the Middle States the local government generally covers a township, but often only a village or a city. In the Western and Southern States the local government often covers a whole county. T. What are the most striking differences between a town, a city and a village ? P. A village or a city is always a collection of buildings; a town (in the American sense, not the English) may contain no buildings at all, or only scattered ones, or it may contain villages or even cities. T. Is not a city sometimes called a town ? P. Yes, but that is only a fashion of speaking, just as men, women and children are called mankind. T. You say Americans generally live un- jagOTeramefts.f der at least four governments: do they sometimes live under more ? P. Yes: sometimes under both town and village government, as well as county, state and national. Sometimes, too, even the school districts of a town attend to more of their local affairs than merely those of the school, and really constitute an additional govern...