men, the town officers, and thirty or forty inhabitants. Those who thus came were for the most part drawn to it from some official duty or private interest, which, when performed or attained, they generally troubled themselves but little, or not at all, about the other business of the meeting." 1 Under these circumstances it was found necessary in 1822 to drop the town - meeting altogether and devise a new form of government for Boston. After various plans had been suggested and discussed, it was decided that the new government should be vested in a Mayor; a select council of eight persons to be called the Board of Aldermen; and a Common Council of forty-eight persons, four from each of twelve wards into which the city was to be divided. All these officials were to be elected by the people. At the same time the official name "Town of Boston" was changed to "City of Boston." There is more or less of history involved in these offices and designations, to which we may devote a few words of explanation. In New England Distinctions between towns and cities. local usage there is an ambiguity in the word "town." As an official designation it means the inhabitants of a township considered as a community or corporate body. In common parlance it often means the patch of land constituting the township on the map, as when we say that Squire Brown's elm is "the biggest tree in town." But it still oftener means a collection of streets, houses, and families too large to be called a village, but without the municipal government that characterizes a city. Sometimes it is used par excellence for a city, as when an inhabitant of Cambridge, itself a large suburban city, speaks of going to Boston as going "into town." But such 1 Quincy's Municipal History of Boston, p. 28. cases are of course mere survivals from the time when the suburb was a village. In American usage generally the town is something between village and city, a kind of inferior or incomplete city. The image which it calls up in the mind is of something urban and not rural. This agrees substantially with the usage in European history, where "town" ordinarily means a walled town or city as contrasted with a village. In England the word is used either in this general sense, or more specifically as signifying an inferior city, as in America. But the thing which the town lacks, as compared with the complete city, is very different in America from what it is in England. In America it is municipal government common council. which in order to make it a city. In England the town may (and usually does) have this municipal government; but it is not distinguished by the Latin name "city unless it has a cathedral and a bishop. Or in other words the English city is, or has been, the capital of a diocese. Other towns in England are distinguished as "boroughs," an old Teutonic word which was originally applied to towns as fortified places. The voting inhabitants of an English city are called "citizens;" those of a borough are called "burgesses." Thus the official corporate designation of Cambridge is "the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses of Cambridge; " but Oxford is the seat of a bishopric, and its corporate designation is "the mayor, aldermen, and citizens of Oxford." with mayor, aldermen, and must be added to the town 1 The word appears in many town names, such as Edinburgh, Scarborough, Canterbury, Bury St. Edmunds; and on the Continent, as Hamburg, Cherbourg, Burgos, etc. In Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, the name "borough" is applied to a certain class of municipalities with some of the powers of cities. QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT. I. What is the essential difference between township govern◄ ment and county government? 2. What is the distinct advantage of the former ? 3. Why is direct government impossible in the county ? 6. What difficulties in direct government were experienced in Boston in 1820 and many years preceding? 7. What remedy for these difficulties was adopted? 8. Show how the word "town" is used to indicate a. The land of a township. b. A somewhat large collection of streets, houses, and families. c. And even, in some instances, a city. 9. What is the town commonly understood to be in American usage? 10. What is the difference in the United States between a town and a city? 11. What is the difference in England between a town and a city? 12. Distinguish between citizens and burgesses in England. "Chesters." § 2. Origin of English Boroughs and Cities. What, then, was the origin of the English borough or city? In the days when Roman legions occupied for a long time certain military stations in Britain, their camps were apt to become centres of trade and thus to grow into cities. Such places were generally known as casters or chesters, from the Latin castra, "camp," and there are many of them on the map of England to-day. But these were exceptional cases. As a rule the origin of the borough was as purely English as its name. We have seen that the town was originally the dwelling-place of a stationary clan, surrounded by palisades into fortified or by a dense quickset hedge. Now where boroughs. such small enclosed places were thinly scat tered about they developed simply into villages. But Coalescence of towns where, through the development of trade or any other cause, a good many of them grew up close together within a narrow compass, they gradually coalesced into a kind of compound town; and with the greater population and greater wealth, there was naturally more elaborate and permanent fortification than that of the palisaded village. There were massive walls and frowning turrets, and the place came to be called a fortress or "borough." The borough, then, "was simply several townships packed tightly together; a hundred smaller in extent and thicker in population than other hundreds." 1 The borough dred. From this compact and composite character of the borough came several important results. We have seen that the hundred was the smallest area for the administration of justice. The town as a hunship was in many respects self-governing, but it did not have its court, any more than the New England township of the present day has its court. The lowest court was that of the hundred, but as the borough was equivalent to a hundred it soon came to have its own court. And although much obscurity still surrounds the early history of municipal government in England, it is probable that this court was a representative board, like any other hundred court, and that the relation of the borough to its constituent townships resembled the relation of the modern city to its constituent wards. But now as certain boroughs grew larger and annexed outlying townships, or acquired adjacent territory which presently became covered with The borough streets and houses, their constitution became as a county. still more complex. The borough came to embrace 1 Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 466. For a description of the hundred, see above, pp. 75-80. several closely packed hundreds, and thus became analogous to a shire. In this way it gained for itself a sheriff and the equivalent of a county court. For example, under the charter granted by Henry I. in 1101, London was expressly recognized as a county by itself. Its burgesses could elect their own chief magistrate, who was called the port-reeve, inasmuch as London is a seaport; in some other towns he was called the borough-reeve. He was at once the chief executive officer and the chief judge. The burgesses could also elect their sheriff, although in all rural counties Henry's father, William the Conqueror, had lately deprived the people of this privilege and appointed the sheriffs himself. London had its representative board, or council, which was the equivalent of a county court. Each ward, moreover, had its own representative board, which was the equivalent of a hundred court. “Within the wards, or hundreds, the burgesses were grouped together in township, parish, or manor. Into the civic organization of London, to whose special privileges all lesser cities were ever striving to attain, the elements of local administration embodied in the township, the hundred, and the shire thus entered as component parts. "1 Constitutionally, therefore, London was a little world in itself, and in a less degree the same was true of other cities and boroughs which afterwards obtained the same kind of organization, as for example, York and Newcastle, Lincoln and Norwich, Southampton and Bristol. ... In such boroughs or cities all classes of society were brought into close contact, barons The guilds. and knights, priests and monks, merchants 1 Hannis Taylor, Origin and Growth of the English Constitu tion, vol. i. p. 458. |