ve board, or _common
council_, elected by the citizens. The aldermen and common council
held their meetings in the Guildhall, and over these meetings presided
the chief magistrate, or port-reeve, who by this time, in accordance
with the fashion then prevailing, had assumed the French title of
_mayor_. As London had come to be a little world in itself,
so this city government reproduced on a small scale the national
government; the mayor answering to the king, the aristocratic board of
aldermen to the House of Lords, and the democratic common council to
the House of Commons. A still more suggestive comparison, perhaps,
would be between the aldermen and our federal Senate, since the
aldermen represented wards, while the common council represented the
citizens.

[Sidenote: The city of London.]
The constitution thus perfected in the city of London[6] six hundred
years ago has remained to this day without essential change. The voters
are enrolled members of companies which represent the ancient guilds.
Each year they choose one of the aldermen to be lord mayor. Within the
city he has precedence next to the sovereign and before the royal
family; elsewhere he ranks as an earl, thus indicating the equivalence
of the city to a county, and with like significance he is lord
lieutenant of the city and justice of the peace. The twenty-six
aldermen, one for each ward, are elected by the people, such as are
entitled to vote for members of parliament; they are justices of the
peace. The common councilmen, 206 in number, are also elected by the
people, and their legislative power within the city is practically
supreme; parliament does not think of overruling it. And the city
government thus constituted is one of the most clean-handed and
efficient in the world.[7]

[Footnote 6: The city of London extends east and west from the Tower
to Temple Bar, and north and south from Finsbury to the Thames, with
a population of not more than 100,000, and is but a small part of the
enormous metropolitan area now known as London, which is a circle of
twelve miles radius in every direction from its centre at Charing
Cross, with a population of more than 5,000,000. This vast area is an
agglomeration of many parishes, manors, etc., and has no municipal
government in common.]

[Footnote 7: Loftie, _History of London _, vol. i. p. 446]
[Sidenote: English cities, the bulwarks of liberty.]

The development of other English cities and boroughs was so f