An unsuccessful attempt has been made to reduce the size
of the counties. But what seems perhaps more likely to happen is the
practical division of the counties into school districts, and the
gradual development of these school districts into something like
self-governing townships. To this very interesting point we shall
again have occasion to refer.
[Sidenote: The _hundred_ in Maryland.]
[Sidenote: Clans, brotherhoods, and tribes]
We come now to Maryland. The early history of local institutions in
this state is a fascinating subject of study. None of the American
colonies had a more distinctive character of its own, or reproduced
old English usages in a more curious fashion. There was much in
colonial Maryland, with its lords of the manor, its bailiffs and
seneschals, its courts baron and courts leet, to remind one of the
England of the thirteenth century. But of these ancient institutions,
long since extinct, there is but one that needs to be mentioned in the
present connection. In Maryland the earliest form of civil community
was called, not a parish or township, but a _hundred_. This
curious designation is often met with in English history, and the
institution which it describes, though now almost everywhere extinct,
was once almost universal among men.
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