ge
revenues imperfectly accounted for, with a system which stops the
principal city government at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a
hundred detestable parishes, with the maintenance of a horde of
luxurious and useless bodies. For the want of all which makes Paris
nice and splendid we justly reproach the Corporation of London; for the
existence of much of what makes London mean and squalid we justly
reproach it too. Yet the Corporation of London was for centuries a
bulwark of English liberty. The conscious support of the near and
organised capital gave the Long Parliament a vigour and vitality which
they could have found nowhere else. Their leading patriots took refuge
in the City, and the nearest approach to an English "sitting in
permanence" is the committee at Guildhall, where all members "that came
were to have voices". Down to George III.'s time the City was a useful
centre of popular judgment. Here, as elsewhere, we have built into our
polity pieces of the scaffolding by which it was erected.

De Tocqueville indeed used to maintain that in this matter the English
were not merely historically excusable but likewise politically
judicious. He founded what may be called the culte of corporations. And
it was natural, that in France, where there is scarcely any power of
self-organisation in the people, where the prefet must be asked upon
every subject, and take the initiative in every movement, a solitary
thinker should be repelled from the exaggerations of which he knew the
evil, to the contrary exaggeration of which he did not. But in a
country like England where business is in the air, where we can
organise a vigilance committee on every abuse and an executive
committee for every remedy--as a matter of political instruction, which
was De Tocqueville's point--we need not care how much power is
delegated to outlying bodies, and how much is kept for the central
body. We have had the instruction municipalities could give us: we have
been through all that. Now we are quite grown up, and can put away
childish things.

The same causes account for the innumerable anomalies of our polity. I
own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these
anomalies which haunts some of our best critics. It is natural that
those who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all
things upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer
peculiarities. But it is natural also that persons used to analyse