pointment of municipal officers, or any other matter affecting the general interests. In this assembly, held commonly once a week, appeared the body of burgesses in person, to whom, together with their officers, whom they elected annually, every general privilege conveyed by the royal charters was granted; and however vested in later times, every power exercised in the antient boroughs has derived its origin from the acts of this assembly. How the increase of population and extension of trade in the larger towns led naturally to the introduction of the representative principle in local legislation, &c., and the natural tendency of its operation towards the production of an aristocratic organization, will be best illustrated in a succinct view of the history of the metropolitan municipality itself, the magnitude of which has afforded the fullest scope for the distinct development of these tendencies.

Although William of Normandy, in consolidating his conquest, had trampled out even those scattered sparks of political vitality which in the course of his invading career he had spared in order to deaden or shorten local resistance, yet his successors soon found it to their purpose, though still retaining the arbitrary grasp of the Norman crown upon the municipal liberties and properties of the AngloSaxon townsmen, to exercise that power in the case of the more important cities and ports with somewhat less harsh ness than William had done. Thus it was that London in particular, and the sea-ports on the south-eastern coast, then of primary importance to the Norman crown for maintaining a free communication with its continental dominions, as well as supplying its naval force, were early objects of royal favour-for some time indeed capriciously extended and withdrawn, but settling into permanence with the growth of Anglo-Norman society. Another circumstance contributed to give to these towns the lead in the general progress of the burgess population towards the recovery of their civil and political freedom. Though the great majority of the burgesses, even in these favoured towns, were necessarily of Anglo-Saxon blood, yet there were soon found among them a certain number of foreign descent, Norman, Angevin, or French, whose ancestors, having settled in England at the Conquest, had applied themselves to various branches of trade. To these individuals, on account of the identity of race and language, the favour of the Norman government was least reluctantly extended; they became, too, the natural interpreters and mediators between the government and the great body of their fellowtownsmen; and the necessary tendency of these two circumstances combined, was to establish in the great metropolitan municipality a Normun party, vastly inferior to the English one in numbers, but dominant in position. This is the true key to the solution of many remarkable and, without it, scarcely intelligible transactions in the early municipal history of London. The operation of these circumstances is very clearly and strikingly exhibited in the great civic commotion in the time of Richard I, in which the most conspicuous actor on the popular side was a citizen of Saxon descent, to whom, from his adherence to the custom of his forefathers in wearing his beard long, the Normans gave the cognomen à la barbe, and whom our modern historians call William Long-Beard. We find this transaction very particularly detailed in the Latin historians of the time, both on the popular and on the Norman side-Roger de Hoveden, Math. Paris, Math. of Westminster, Gervase of Canterbury &c. The facts collected from their joint testimony, as far as they relate to our present inquiry, are these:

was summoned to pay a tallage extraordinary. The mayor and his councillors accordingly convoked a husting, or common-hall, to deliberate as to the proportions in which the gross sum required should be individually imposed. The leading citizens were, as usual, for a partition of the burden, so made as that the lightest portion of it would fall upon themselves. But the Man of the Long Beard stood forward to oppose their intention. He had often before pleaded the cause of his poor English fellow-citizens with more ardour than success, and had gained from them the title of defender or advocate of the poor. Inheriting from industrious parents a competent personal property, he had retired from business, and gave all his leisure to the study of the law, to enable him to extricate the poorer citizens from the toils cast about them by the Norman lawyers. While his English eloquence was vigorous and popular, no Norman clerk excelled him in the art of pleading in French, the only language then admitted in the tribunals. While the use to which he devoted these talents made him dear to the citizens of the middling and lower rate of fortune, the Norman party charged him with misleading the multitude, by filling them with an inordinate desire of liberty and happiness. On the occasion in question, they loaded him with reproaches, and accused him of rebellion and treason against the king. The traitors to the king,' replied the Englishman, are they who defraud his exchequer by exempting themselves from paying what they owe him, and I myself will denounce them to him." Accordingly, he crossed the sea, went to King Richard's camp, knelt before him, and solicited his peace and protection for the poor people of London. Richard received his complaint, promised redress, and when the petitioner was gone, thought no more of it, being too much occupied with his great political concerns to attend to a quarrel among mere burgesses. But the Norman barons and prelates, filling the high offices of the chancery and the exchequer, gave their attention to it, and took part warmly, through national and aristocratic instinct, with the dominant party, against the poorer classes and their advocate. Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, and grand justicier or chief justice of England, provoked that a Saxon should have dared to lay an information before the king against men of Norman blood, and resolved to prevent the recurrence of such a scandal, issued an ordinance, forbidding any man of the commonalty of London to go out of the city, on pain of being seized as a traitor to the king and kingdom; and accordingly, a number of traders, who, notwithstanding the chief justice's orders, went on their ordinary business to the great fair at Stamford, were seized and thrown into prison. These acts of violence caused a great ferment in the city, and the poorer classes of the citizens entered into an association for their common defence. William LongBeard, relying probably on the king's promise, was the soul and leader of this secret society, in which we are told by several historians of the time that fifty thousand persons engaged. They gathered together such weapons as were accessible to burgesses in their state of half-bondage,-as staves shod with iron, axes, and iron crows,-to attack, in case of a conflict, the fortified dwellings of the Normans. They then held several meetings in the open air, at which William addressed them, and encouraged their enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the high Norman functionaries convoking in parliament, at London, the bishops, counts, and barons of the neighbouring provinces, cited the people's orator to appear before that assembly. William obeyed the summons, escorted by a great multitude, calling cation of an immense popularity intimidated the barons in parliament. They postponed the consideration of the charge to an early sitting, which never took place; and used all their efforts, by skilful emissaries, to work upon the popular mind. False promises and false alarms, alternately circulated, lulled the public ferment, and discouraged the justices then themselves called several meetings of the poorer Londoners, and addressing them, now on the necessity of keeping peace and order, now upon the king's power to crush the seditious, they succeeded in sowing doubt and hesitation among the conspirators. Seizing that moment of languor which has always been fatal to a popular party, they required to have delivered to them, as hostages for the public tranquillity, the children of a great many families of the middle and lower classes. The citizens wanted resolu

Among the vexations which the poorer and more nu-him saviour and king of the poor. This unequivocal indimerous class of the citizens had to endure from the more opulent, one of the most frequent was the unfair apportioning of the payment of the tailles or tallages, the nature of which arbitrary exactions we have already described; for sometimes the mayor and aldermen, to whom the royal demand of a fixed sum was addressed, would exempt those who were most able to pay from contri-partisans of the insurrection. The archbishop and the other buting at all; sometimes they ordained that each citizen should contribute the same sum, without any regard to the respective amount of property; so that the heaviest burden constantly fell on those who were the least able to bear it. In the year 1196, when Richard I. was engaged abroad in making war upon the King of France, and his officers in England were raising money for the expenses of his campaigns, and for paying the remainder of his ransom due to the Duke of Austria, the city of London

tion to resist this demand; and the cause of arbitrary power was gained as soon as the hostages were led away from London to confinement in different fortresses. The particulars of the subsequent seizure, summary condemnation, and execution of the popular advocate, and the reputation of martyrdom bestowed upon him by the popular affection, are immaterial to our present purpose. This historical anecdote is introduced merely to exhibit distinctly the source and operation of the first aristocratical distinction that arose in the leading English cities and towns.

But as the distinction of race became lost in the fusion of blood and the rise of the modern English tongue, other circumstances sprung up, tending to create and perpetuate a distinction of civic classes. The progress of individual wealth, as commercial property became more secure against exactions by arbitrary power, and the commercial resources of the country became developed, was among the most powerful of these causes. The necessity, too, for the convenient transaction of the affairs of a multitudinous body, of establishing a representative council for the management of all ordinary business, was another cause operating in the same direction. In London, as early as the close of Henry III.'s reign, the aldermen, and those calling themselves 'the more discreet of the city,' made an attempt to elect a mayor, in opposition to the popular voice; which, however, ended in the triumph of the latter, in a general folk-mote held at St. Paul's Cross. In the reigns of the first three Edwards, it appears that the same election was made by the mayor, aldermen, and a varying number of freemen elected out of each ward. The aldermen, in their original constitution, were only a council to the mayor in the administration of justice and in his other duties, elected annually by the freemen of the several wards; and from them the mayor might resort for advice to the commonalty in general meeting. At an early period, however, the great number of the citizens, and the variety of business to be transacted, made it necessary for them to have a sort of standing committee of their body, to be consulted by the mayor and aldermen, and to exercise the power belonging to the common-hall, in the enacting of bye-laws, and the general administration of the affairs of the community. The whole of this legislative and administrative body, being chosen yearly by and from the commonalty at large, acted under the most direct responsibility to their constituents. Such a council appears, from the city records, to have existed as early as the year 1284: but though it is now deemed in law to be a prescriptive body, this is attributable rather to its not deriving its existence from royal charter, than to any certainty of its existence before the time of legal memory. Its numbers and constitution were often changed. Nearly thirty years after the express recognition, by charter, of the 15th of Edward III., of the power in the citizens to make bye-laws, it was, by consent of all the commons of the city ordained that each of the mysteries (masteries or crafts), that is, each of the trading companies, should choose certain persons to assent to and ordain, with the lordmayor and aldermen, whatever they should deem advisable; to elect the mayor and sheriffs; and to give counsel in all cases where it was formerly sought of the commons. This was in the 43rd or 44th of Edward III., and was confirmed in the 50th of the same reign: but the common-hall or court of hustings of the whole community still retained the right of re-modelling the municipal legislature; and in the 7th of Richard II., the common-council was placed on its present footing by an act of common-hall, passed in the presence of the immense community,' to the effect that, as in such large assemblies things had been done more by clamour than by reason, the aldermen, when, on St. Gregory's day in each year, they were appointed for the year ensuing, should be firmly charged, fifteen days after the said day, to assemble their respective wards, and, by good deliberation, charge them to choose four of the most sufficient persons in their ward, to be of the common-council for the year ensuing, &c., provided that of the whole number no more than eight should be of one mystery. Except as to the prescribed numbers, which were not strictly adhered to, this act of common-hall took full effect; the whole administrative powers of the community were transferred to the legislative body, composed of mayor, aldermen, and common-councilmen, all subject to annual election; and the antient hustings-court fell into comparative desuetude; although, on one subsequent occasion, in the 23rd of Henry VII., we find the mayor, aldermen, common

council, and commons, acting together as one great common→
hall, in accordance with the original constitution.
Such was the natural origin of the courts of aldermen and
common-council in the city of London; and how closely
analogous was their rise in other communities, is abundantly
testified by existing documents.

In those instances where the whole of the citizens or burgesses were numbered in the several trading companies, these, for convenience' sake, sometimes formed the basis of the internal polity of the community, and the election of borough officers and members of the common council became vested in them. London itself presents at this day a remarkable instance of incomplete progression from the household franchise to the adoption of that of the guilds: the inhabitant freemen elect the aldermen and commoncouncilmen; while the liverymen, or members of the several companies (so denominated from the distinguishing peculiarities of costume adopted by each fraternity), resident or non-resident, elect the mayor, sheriffs, chamberlain, and other officers. But, in many boroughs, this basis of the guilds wholly superseded the original scot-and-lot franchise; and in the changes of society which have gradually reduced the guilds from their original position, that thorough substitution has been one constantly growing cause of unfair exclusion. The richest and most influential persons, too, being generally chosen by the inhabitants at large to the highest places in the municipal councils, were often tempted to seek the perpetuation of their authority without the necessity of frequent appeals to the popular voice, and even to usurp powers which it had not delegated at all. Such usurpations however were often vigorously resisted by the community at large; and the contests were sometimes so violent and obstinate as to lead to bloodshed. But in course of time, the Crown itself, so long indifferent to the details of municipal arrangements, found sufficient motives for encouraging these endeavours of internal parties to form close ruling bodies, irresponsible to the general community. In order to trace the development of this policy, we must resume the thread of the political history of the municipalities of England.

We find faint indications of it in several of Henry VIIth's charters; as in one to Bristol in 1499, establishing a selfelective council of aldermen; who yet, though justices, had no exclusive power of municipal government. But the fierceness of religious dissension, which divided the whole nation at the close of the following reign, made the management of the House of Commons an object of primary importance to either Catholic or Protestant successor to the crown. This therefore was the æra of the most active exercise of the prescriptively discretional power of the sheriffs to determine within their several bailiwicks, in issuing their precepts for a genera! election, which of the municipal towns should, and which should not, be held to be parliamentary boroughs. To arbitrarily omit any of the larger towns, or even of the smaller ones, which in public estimation had a prescriptive right to be summoned, was too open an attack on the freedom of parliament to be now ventured upon. The calling of this right into action in boroughs wherein it had lain dormant from the beginning, or, though once exercised, had fallen into disuse from alleged poverty, decay, or other causes, was a more plausible course of proceeding; and notwithstanding the evident partiality with which it was conducted, was permitted to pass without legislative interference.

Accordingly we find in the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, besides seventeen boroughs restored to parliamentary existence, forty-six now first beginning to send members, making altogether an addition to the former representation (as no places were now omitted) of sixty-three places, returning 123 members. But the most important feature in this policy of the crown at this periodthat which mainly contributed to attain the object of that policy-was its novel assumption of the right of remoulding, by governing charters, the municipal constitution of these new or revived parliamentary boroughs. Most of these charters expressly vested the local government, and sometimes the immediate election of the parliamentary representatives, in small councils, originally nominated by the crown, to be ever after self-elected.

This was the first great step on the part of the crown in undermining the political independence of the English municipalities. The successful working of the application of this novel principle to the new or restored parliamentary boroughs, encouraged the Stuarts not only to continue this system of

VOL. V.-2 D

without their own consent the distrust which eventually arose between the people and that House of Commons which so long continued in self-constituted permanency—and its final dissolution by force, to make way for the arbitrary modifications introduced by a military dictator-forms rather an episode in parliamentary history than a link in the chain of that history itself. The endeavours of the Protector to mould a House of Commons which should both second his political views and possess the confidence of the people proved abortive; although, by omitting the more inconsiderable boroughs, proportioning the representation of the others to the population of the several places, and increasing that of the counties, he seems to have made a show at least of seeking to place the general representation on a basis more accordant with the relative numbers and importance of the several constituencies.

erecting close boroughs, but to make a second and a bolder extort from him the act which prevented their being dissolved
advance in the same direction, by attacking the constitutions
of the prescriptively parliamentary municipalities themselves.
Already, in Michaelmas term, 40th and 41st of Elizabeth,
the judges had given a remarkable decision, extremely fa-
vourable to the prosecution of this object. Attempts appear
to have been then making in several of the boroughs to
have popular elections of the principal officers, in opposition
to a custom which had grown up of leaving the elections in
the hands of the common councils. It was now, therefore,
desired to be known whether such elections were legal, in
opposition to the words of a charter vesting the elections
indefinitely in the commonalty. It was on application by
the Privy Council, that the two chief justices, the chief
baron, and the other judges, determined that such custom
was good, because the several boroughs had power to make
bye-laws; and that where no bye-law making such regu-
lation was to be found, it might nevertheless be presumed
that such bye-law had existed, because such custom must
have originated in common consent. And thus it was judi-
cially decided, not only that elections of municipal officers
by select common councils were legal, but that where such
custom had grown up, the community at large were for ever
excluded from such elections.

The incongruities involved in this decision, and the disre-
gard of all constitutional principle, are very notable. That
the plenitude of royal prerogative established at the Con-
quest should have excluded, for ages before, all appeal to
the inherent right of freemen to a voice in the appointment
of those who were to have the direction of their common
affairs, is perfectly intelligible. That on the royal charter,
and that alone, they constantly rested their title to such
power of internal organization as they claimed to exer-
cise, is sufficiently manifest. Here the burgesses and
the royal judges should seem to have been meeting on com-
mon ground. The burgesses simply appealed against a
vicious custom of later growth to the superior and anterior
authority of their charter. The judges, instead of vindi-
cating that authority, as it should have been the primary
interest of the prerogative to do, asserted-first, that the
power of making bye-laws, given by the charter, empowered
the community to make a law contravening an express pro-
vision of the same charter; secondly, that there was a par-
ticular kind of bye-law, which, though the community had
power to enact, they had no power to repeal; and thirdly,
that in a certain case, the existence of an express law was
to be presumed from a usage commencing within time of
memory. This transaction, therefore, presents a most curious
example of the compromising, by the crown itself, of the
very principles on which the stability of the prerogative
most firmly rested, in the eager pursuit of its immediate
policy.

The judicial authority being thus once brought into play to decide, for the crown's own immediate convenience, upon the extent and durability of its powers in the granting of municipal charters, was kept in active operation throughout the Stuart reigns. In the twelfth year of James I. it proceeded so far as to declare that the king could, by his charter, incorporate the people of a town in the form of select classes and commonalty, and vest in the whole corporation the right of sending representatives to parliament, at the same time restraining the exercise of that right to the select classes; and such was thenceforward the form of all the corporations which royal charters created or remodelled. After this fashion it was that, under James I. and Charles I., seventeen more parliamentary boroughs were revived; and that James created four, making a total addition to the borough representation of forty-one members, besides the four members for the two English universities, which James first introduced.

A free parliament' was as much the national watchword in 1660 as it had been in 1640; and Charles II.'s hereditary claim would have availed him little without that parliament's declaration of it.

The thirteenth year of this reign is memorable for the enactment of the statute, commonly known as the Corporation Act, which so long operated to the exclusion both of Roman Catholics and of Dissenters from all corporate offices. It provides that no person or persons shall be placed, elected, or chosen, in or to any of the offices of mayor, aldermen, recorders, bailiffs, town clerks, common-councilmen, or other offices of magistracy, or place or trust, or other employment relating to or concerning the government of any city, corporation, borough, cinque port, or any of their members, or other port-town, within England, Wales, and Berwick-uponTweed, that shall not have, one year before such election or choice, taken the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of England. But this legislative measure, which was dictated by the public opinion of the time, and so long operated to the exclusion of Roman Catholies as well as Dissenters from all municipal offices, was not at all conducive to the views of the Court. After lavishing every means at its disposal for the management of the House of Commons by the dispensing of bribes and pensions to individual members, that Court, ever prodigal and ever needy, meditated at once a cheaper and more permanently effective process of ensuring parliamentary subserviency, by pushing to its furthest limit the old policy of remodelling municipal corporations. Even this was felt to be a bold attempt; but it was deemed less hazardous than the endeavour to reign without a parliament, in which Charles I. had failed.

As the proceedings now adopted against such of the governing charters of cities and boroughs as still sanctioned a too popular municipal constitution, was a general filing of what are technically termed informations in the nature of quo warranto, from the prominence of those words in the old Latin formula of the instrument itself, it is necessary that we should briefly explain the origin and use of that form of proceeding on the part of the legal advisers and officers of the crown.

Although many of the antient boroughs received their first Anglo-Norman charters of liberty from the successors of those military leaders who had received from the Conqueror the largest shares of the national spoil, yet the general relaxation of the feudal bonds at the same time that the relations of the boroughs with the crown became more determinate and regular, brought nearly all of them, at an early period, into immediate dependence, as the demesne boroughs were from the first, upon the validity of royal charters for the maintenance of their most important privileges. When some degree of regularity arose out of the judicial chaos necessarily introduced by such a conThat all these arts combined were insufficient to counter- quest, the justices itinerant were empowered by the crown act in the representative house the popular spirit, and the to inquire, in their circuit, by what warrant all who spread of political knowledge consequent on the diffusion of claimed any franchise in derogation of the crown, from printing, so far as to render that assembly thoroughly sub-which all local liberties were assumed to emanate, mainservient to the views of the Court at that period, is a fact too tained their title. In the 18th year of Edward I., who notorious to be here enlarged upon. Charles I. attempted, laboured strenuously in various ways to infuse order and and persevered in attempting, that which even Edward I. permanence into the internal administration of the realm, had found it expedient solemnly to forego-the levying of we find the following statute, the terms of which seem general taxes without consent of the Commons in par- directed to an object quite contrary to that which in the liament. This was the true commencement of the struggle. use of the proceeding in question the crown so eagerly purThe narrative of the consequent events-of the necessity sued at a later period.--Concerning the writ that is called which drove him once more to have recourse to parliament quo warranto, our lord the king, at the feast of Pentecost, the necessity, not less urgent, which drove the Commons to in the eighteenth year of his reign, hath established, that

with his management might have subverted the constitu-
tion. This system soon fell after it came under the
management of a successor, against whom the whole na-
tion was exasperated, The first and only parliament of
James II. displayed the full influence of his brother's mea-
sures,-the effect of laying corporations under the control
of the crown and vesting the election of their magistrates
in the select classes; a parliament convened ready to forge
chains for themselves and the nation,-a parliament whose
servility needed only a little duplicity in the king to rendor
him the most arbitrary sovereign in Europe. This prince,
'after having tried in vain to avail himself of his brother's
arrangements, endeavouring when too late to regain popular
favour, abandoned them in despair, and issued a proclama-
tion to restore corporations to their original state,
'Some availed themselves of this advantage and a more
constitutional reign; but the select classes of corporations,
unwilling to relinquish the influence they had acquired
under the new constitutions of Charles, still retained in their
grasp the municipal power, and by this means prevented
the restoration of popular elections. It was a new case for
the tribunals. The operation of the recent proceedings
under the shadow of legal form, and of such surrenders
and new incorporations, was not generally understood.
Many of the former officers had died or removed from the
municipalities, the new officers were of the royal party, and
the aristocratic ascendency was not easily overthrown. The
doctrine of the case of corporations,' above cited, that by a
elective vote, that it might by the same method be reposed
in the select classes, and that modern usage was sufficient
evidence of such a bye-law-in many instances continued
the constitution of corporations in the form instituted by
Charles, under pretext of lost bye-laws, after the charters
were professedly abandoned.

all those who claim to have quiet possession of any franchise before the time of King Richard, without interruption, and can show the same by a lawful inquest, shall well enjoy their possession; and in case that possession be demanded for cause reasonable, our lord the king shall confirm it by title. And those that have old charters of privileges shall have the said charters adjudged according to the tenor and form of them; and those that have lost their liberties since Easter last past by the aforesaid writ, according to the course of pleading in the same writ heretofore used, shall have restitution of their franchise lost, and from henceforth they shall have according to the nature of this present constitution. The proceeding by quo warranto, however, had long been obsolete when the crown lawyers of Charles II. ventured to revive it on so extensive a scale. The selection of this mode of proceeding seems to have been as injudicious as the purpose of it was dishonest. The crown lawyers, more violent than learned, observes Mr. Willcock, in the introduction to his ' Law of Municipal Corporations,' instead of first proceeding by scire facias to repeal the charters on pretence of forfeiture, which would have given the subsequent judgments at least the semblance of being conclusive, mistook their proceeding, and by filing informations in the nature of quo warranto against all the obnoxious corporations, proceeded in such a manner that it was impossible to obtain even the appearance of a lawful judgment against them, since it could be sustained only upon two grounds: either that there were no such corporations ever established, and the bodies assuming to act as such were merely self-bye-law the corporation at large might be divested of the constituted; to which the charters and well-known usage throughout the land offered a manifest contradiction ;—or | that all the corporations had been dissolved for want of officers and members, and the persons assuming to act as such were all mere usurpers; to which the very form of the information offered a plain inconsistency, by admitting that the corporations of which they were accused as usurping the offices were still in existence. Ill-chosen and unjust as the measure was, judges were found* vile enough for the roval purpose.' London, which in latter times had usually taken the lead in asserting the political independence of the more important English municipalities, and the example of which, from this circumstance as well as from its superior wealth and power, had ever been so influential, was selected as the first object of attack. At this particular time it was in especial disfavour; for the king having, with a view to deprive the last parliament which he held of the encouragement which was derived from the vicinity of that powerful and independent city, summoned it to meet at Oxford, London not only re-elected the members which it had returned to the last parliament at Westminster, but voted them their thanks for their spirited conduct. Now, therefore, after the most learned advocates in the land had been heard on the proceedings against London, judgment was given of seizure of its franchise to be a corporation into the king's hands, as forfeited.' The determination of the information against the metropolis spread consternation through the kingdom, by the assistance of which and the intrigues of the court party, almost all the other municipalities were prevailed on either to suffer judgment against them by default, of which the crown made a use as erroneous as of the original proceeding, by treating it as a final and conclusive judgment, or to surrender their charters in hope of conciliating the despot's favour. Here, too, the crown lawyers mistook the law, or, confiding in the plenitude of arbitrary prerogative, thought its rules unworthy their consideration. New charters were granted without using the precaution to enrol many of the surrenders, on account of which they were wholly inoperative, even should we admit that a municipal corporation has power to surrender the franchise of being a corporation.

The labours of this prince were productive of no advantage to himself; for although the co-operation of his partizans, the servility of judges, and the verdicts of party juries, effected the subversion of the corporations and promised a parliament venal as the realm could produce, his alarm at any assembly which might pretend to represent the people, and be possibly influenced by their opinions, was so great, that he deferred the period of their convention until death undermined the system of contrivance which

• Pemberton, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was removed to be Chief Justice of the Common Pleas ; and Saunders, who had drawn the pleadings and advised on the part of the crown, was raised to be Chief Justice of the King's Bench just before the term in which the judgment was given.

'So dilatory and expensive was it for the freemen to vindicate their rights, so much were they under the private control of the members of the select classes, so easy was it by compromise with the more active individuals to defer the inquiry, and so unimportant did this franchise in some cases appear, that at the present day many corporations are not emancipated from the influence of these tyrannical proceedings. The struggle has been violent and expensive; the lapse of time had involved the question in new difficulties; and several important points on this part of the law were not settled until the decision of the case of Chester, in the House of Lords, after two trials in the country and one at bar.

Since the abdication of King James, the government has abstained from open interference with the liberties of corporations; but they have been incessantly disturbed by the cabals of private parties, for the purpose of influencing the returns of members to parliament, the effect of which has been to bring them more frequently under the inspection of the Court of King's Bench, and to introduce a new system of legal proceedings for the investigation of their conduct. The ancient writ of Quo Warranto has long ago fallen into disuse. The information in the nature of a Quo Warranto has been moulded into a regular form of action by the statute of the ninth year of the reign of Anne, aided by that of the thirty-second of George the Third; and the determinations of the court. Proceedings on the Writ of Mandamus have also assumed a similar regularity through the liberal interpretation of the same statute of Queen Anne, and those of the eleventh and twelfth years of George the Third.'

But although, since the reign of James II., no attempt has been made to recur to the Stuart measures against such of the corporations as still retained, in whole or in part, a popular constitution; yet, as the municipal corporation commissioners observe in their late report, the charters which have been granted since the Revolution are framed nearly on the model of those of the preceding era; they show adisregard of any settled or consistent plan for the improve ment of municipal policy corresponding with the progress of society. The charters of George III. do not differ in this respect from those granted in the worst period of the history of these boroughs."

Resuming the history of their parliamentary relations, we must observe that under Charles II, was made the latest addition to the town representation. In that reign, after repeated attempts, since the time of Henry VIII., made in the House of Commons, but defeated by the House of

Lords or the withholding of the royal assent, to procure it to be enacted that the palatine county of Durham, as well as that of Chester, should send representatives to the Commons' House, it was at length passed into an act, that the city of Durham, as well as the county, should thenceforth send two members; and two members were granted to Newark by royal charter in reward of its exertions for Charles I. during the civil war.

It may be remarked, that in the assembly which addressed the Prince of Orange to issue letters for a convention parliament, the city of London again figured very prominently; the mayor, aldermen, and fifty of the common council, being added to the invitation sent to all who had sat in any House of Commons during the reign of Charles II.

tions. In following the new order of movements which re ceived its first impulse in the Reform Act, we may already trace a progress the reverse of that which had been going on for centuries before. As the vitiation of the municipal constitutions of the towns had been requisite to prepare the way for their political prostration,-so their political emancipation to so large an extent opened the way towards their municipal regeneration. The means which the wielders of prerogative have at all times deemed necessary to the attainment of their political ends, inevitably became a source of local evil in the several municipalities. The new organization of the representative system immediately operated in various ways to force the state of the municipal system into consideration. In the first place, the extinction The last important modification in the exercise of the of the most extremely insignificant or decayed parliaparliamentary franchise in cities and boroughs generally, mentary boroughs under that Act,-the extension of the enacted before the present æra, was the provision of an act boundaries of other boroughs, in a measure corresponding of the ninth year of Queen Anne, which disqualifies every with the growth of the places beyond their antient limits, person (except the eldest son of a peer or of a person quali- the enfranchising of the great modern towns,-and above all, fied to be a knight of the shire) from becoming a member the vesting of the franchise substantially in the inhabitant for a city, borough, or port, who is not possessed of a free-householders,-all combined to exhibit in strong relief the hold or copyhold estate of 300l. annual value, clear of all great defects of the yet standing corporation system. The incumbrances. almost superstitious reverence for the mysterious character attributed to corporations-a reverence which the mystic language of crown lawyers respecting them had constantly been cherishing-was now utterly dissolved; and men were in a condition to place coolly side by side in their contemplation the proper and legitimate ends of town government itself, and the character of the associated bodies which asserted an imprescriptible right to act as the only instru

Both the Corporation Act, already specified, and the Test Act, which required every officer, civil or military, to receive the Lord's Supper according to the forms of the Established Church, and to make the declaration against transubstantiation, had for many years been comparatively imperative, when, in the year 1828, after their repeal had long been advocated by the liberal opposition in the House of Commons, it was made a government measure, and passed into an act.ments for attaining those ends. For some time previous the public opinion against the exclusion for religious opinions, perpetuated by these statutes, had so far preponderated, that it was usual, at the close of each session of parliament, to pass an act to indemnify such as had exercised office without complying with their requisitions.

This measure, and the more important one which speedily followed it, the complete political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, were passed without any direct view to the amelioration of the representative system. The revolution of 1688, as we have seen, though it restored a popular constitution to some of the municipalities which had most recently been deprived of it, removed none of the vices in the general system. The history of the long period between that event and the introduction of the bill for an extensive and systematic amelioration of the representative system, brought into the House of Commons by the ministers of the crown in 1831, is in a great measure the history of the transfer, from various causes, of the political influence over parliamentary boroughs from the hands of the crown, which, for its own purposes, had moulded and adapted them to be so influenced, to those of private proprietors and patrons, among whom were always many members of the House of Lords. Thus there arose a new and unprecedented parliamentary system. That command of a majority of borough votes in the House of Commons, which even the later Stuarts had wanted means to realize, was obtained in the course of the last century, through the vastly augmented amount of government patronage arising from the great increase of the army, navy, colonial, and all other public departments, the establishment and rapid growth of the customs and excise, &c., &c. That, we say, which the Stuart government could not compass by the distribution of money, later administrations were enabled to accomplish by the distribution of place. The trafficking in the close boroughs, or as they were more popularly termed, the rotten boroughs-that is, the purchasing the power of directly influencing the election of, or absolutely nominating their members, became, to use the well-known words of a minister, delivered in the Commons' House itself, as notorious as the sun at noon-day,' and for a long and eventful period was almost as little the subject of animadversion with any considerable portion of the public.

It belongs to the general history of the House of Commons, to trace in detail the progress of the great question of parliamentary reform,' as the desired amelioration of the representative house of parliament was so long designated. [COMMONS, HOUSE OF.]

We now come to consider the operation of the great change in the political relations of the cities and boroughs, in bringing about the change in their municipal constitu

One singular result of the mystery which, for purposes which we have already sufficiently indicated, had been thrown about the being and end of a corporation, now became distinctly apparent. So little, it should seem, had it been understood that good local government should be the primary object of this body's existence, that in the local acts of parliament which in latter times have been passed for the improvement of nearly all the more considerable towns, the superintendence of the police, and the powers necessary for watching, paving, lighting, cleansing, and supplying the towns with water, instead of being intrusted to the municipal authorities, had for the most part been committed to various distinct and independent bodies,although none of these towns were too extensive to be embraced by one system of municipal government;-not indeed that the inhabitants in any case desired that their municipal authorities should exercise these new powers: for although they had not yet discovered what was or should be the use of a municipal corporation, they were convinced that in the great majority of instances, constituted as it then was, it was not an engine working to the production of their local well-being.

It is the less wonderful that the inhabitants of corporate towns should have come to this conclusion, when we find, as appeared in the recent inquiry, that few corporations admitted any positive obligation to spend the surplus of their income for objects of public advantage. They regarded such expenditure as a spontaneous act of private generosity, rather than a well-considered application of the public revenue; and the credit to which the corporation, in such a case, generally considered itself entitled, was not that of judicious administrators, but of liberal benefactors. From this rooted opinion that the corporate property was held in trust for the corporate body only, distinct from the community with which it was locally connected, the transition was not unnatural to the opinion that individual corporators might justifiably derive a personal advantage from that property; and accordingly we find that at Cambridge the practice of turning the corporation property to the profit of individuals was avowed and defended before the municipal commissioners by a member of the common council.

The operation of the parliamentary Reform Act upon the local affairs of those boroughs in particular which it wholly disfranchised, and of others in which it destroyed the exclusive influence, afforded additional illustration at least as to what was not the use of a municipal corporation on the old principle. In many of these the revenues were inadequate to the wants of the municipality, and the deficiency had been supplied either from the funds of the patron or by the members for the borough. In some, before the passing of the Reform Act, the members or the patron paid all the municipal expenses; but since that epoch these