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d 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." [Sidenote: Distinctions between towns and cities.] 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 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 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--with mayor, aldermen, and common council--which must be added to the town 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
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