The Shire seemed like an awfully nice place to live.
“The Shire seemed like an awfully nice place to live.”
Sure did. One thing I knew but never really pondered in this context, is that they had a small government (figuratively and literally).
Government in the Shire was very limited, and thinking about it now, it reminds me very much of the early days of the US. There was a postal service, and a number of Shirriffs to keep the peace, along with the Bounders, who were kind of like militiamen, called up to defend the Shire as needed.
There are really only 2 government offices mentioned in the books for the Shire, the Thain, and the Mayor of Michel Delving. The Thain was a title of nobility, passed down hereditarily, and was pretty much like commander-in-chief, but symbolic in peaceful times. The Mayor was elected, and ran the post office and the police forces.
Other than that, the hobbits pretty much governed themselves, with families and clans having their own authority figures who probably settled most disputes. Besides the hereditary Thain, it probably wasn’t much different from an early, mostly rural America with its limited government.
They even had the right to keep and bear arms, and the episode with Farmer Maggot demonstrates the “Castle doctrine” as well: he caught the hobbits stealing his produce on his land, and he would have been well within his rights to order his dogs to kill them if he wanted to!