Common Council of London

“ Thus we have those who have concentrated their efforts to evolving out of the remote past the municipal organization of the City. Their task has been to unfold the origin and institution of the Mayoralty and Shrievalty of London, the division of the City into wards with Aldermen at their head, the development of the various trade and craft guilds, and the respective powers and duties of the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council, and of the Livery of London assembled in their Common Hall. ”

“ This arrangement, however, was of brief duration, and a more permanent settlement was effected in the reign of Richard II. It was then agreed that every ward should annually elect four of the most efficient persons in the ward to sit in the Common Council for the following year, and whose names should be presented to the mayor —that high functionary being charged to accept no more than eight members of any one "mystery" for the whole city. ”

“ They were twenty-eight in number.658 The first six had reference to the appointment of justices of the peace in the city and Southwark, whilst others dealt with the City's right to the conservancy of the Thames, the restitution of the City's Irish estate and the extension of its jurisdiction over the Tower. Parliament was further urged to empower the Common Council to correct, amend or repeal any by-law made or procured by any company or mistery of London, notwithstanding any statute or law to the contrary, and generally to extend the powers of the City. ”

“ Corporation of the City of London.—The legislation of 1855, 1888 and 1899 left the government of the small area of the City in the hands of an unreformed Corporation. Here at least the medieval system, in spite of any anomalies with respect to modern conditions, has resisted reform, and no other municipal body shares the traditions and peculiar dignity of the City Corporation. This consists of a Lord Mayor, 26 aldermen and 206 common councilmen, forming the Court of Common Council, which is the principal administrative body. ”

“ Vested with such powers as these, the Corporation of London are clearly competent to introduce whatever reforms circumstances may render desirable. As practical men of business, the Court of Common Council may fairly be supposed to be the best judges as to the nature of the amendments to be made, and the right time of making them. Persons engaged in commercial pursuits are not usually obstructive, or opposed to useful innovations. On the contrary, being wedded to no theories, they are constantly impelled to change, and to act upon each emergency as it arises. ”

“ All which common-council men shall have such and as great power and authority in the city, as the common council of the city of London have and enjoy there.
Twenty-four of the most substantial citizens dwelling in the city, shall be chosen Aldermen, and shall hold that state and degree for life, unless there be any reasonable cause for removing them, whose names shall be read before the common council yearly, that every Easter Monday, six of them may be chosen before the mayor by the common council, for Conisford ward ”

“ In other words, the king might always look to the City for support so long as he was content to exercise his prerogative for the preservation of "parliamentary engagements" and chartered rights. [515] The livery and the Common Council, so long opposed to each other, became allies again, and the former body passed a formal vote of thanks at a special Common Hall (13 Feb., 1784) to the representative body of the City for the address they had carried up to the throne "thereby setting an example to the whole kingdom." ”

“ The next year the privileges of the citizens were struck at by their own magistrates, in a very extraordinary act of Common Council, which enjoined the citizens, under the penalty of an hundred pounds, not to carry any goods or merchandize to any fair or market within the kingdom, for the term of seven years; but this scandalous and unjust by-law was 36the next year set aside by act of Parliament.
In the year 1500, the plague carried off 20,000 persons in London; and during this reign the city also suffered greatly by the oppressions of the King’s ministers Empson and Dudley ”

“ Its scope may be briefly indicated as including (a) duties exercised elsewhere by the Borough Councils, and by the London County Council (although that body is by no means powerless within the City boundaries) ; and (b) peculiar duties such as control of markets and police. The election of common councilmen, whose institution dates from the reign of Edward I., takes place annually, the electors being the ratepayers, divided among the twenty-five wards of the City. An alderman (q.v.) of each ward (save that the wards of Cripplegate within and without, share one) is elected for life. ”

“ A letter800 was accordingly despatched to Fairfax the same night, to the effect that, as it appeared from the declaration that the main object of the army drawing so near London was to bring back to a free parliament at Westminster those members who had withdrawn owing to the tumult on the 26th July, the Common Council heartily concurred therein, and no opposition whatever would be shown to the troops appointed to escort the members to Westminster. The City declared itself ready to submit to parliament in everything, and offered its entire force for its protection. ”

“ The House of Lords was dissolved, and all the best members excluded from the House of Commons. By "pretended ordinances" of parliament, all those worthy citizens who, according to their allegiance and covenant, had engaged to procure and secure a personal treaty with the king, were rendered incapable to be elected into the Common Council or any other office of trust in the city. ”

“ Before the year 1347, there were only two Common Council men returned for each ward, which being thought inefficient to represent the numerous body of the commons, it was at that time agreed, that each of the city wards should chuse a number of Common Council men according to its dimensions ”

“ To meet this requisition the Mayor in council levied a rate on the city, the raising of which was the occasion of continual broils between the magistrates and freemen, which ended in the Jury of Aldermanbury making a presentation before the Justices Itinerant and the Lord Treasurer sitting in the Tower of London, to this effect:—"That the commonalty of London is, and ought to be, common, and that the citizens are not bound to be taxed without the special command of the king, or without their common consent ”

“ Whilst offering these explanations the City was anxious that parliament would receive into its House all such members as were still alive and fill up the places of all who were dead. On the 29th the Common Council resolved that this petition should not be laid before the House until further order.1128 The commissioners appointed by the City to confer with Haslerigg, Morley and Walton at Portsmouth had returned, and their report made to the Common Council on that day may have given rise to the postponement. ”

“ To all these requests the Lords gave a ready assent.877 The Commons, however, to whom a similar petition was presented the same day, whilst signifying their assent to the amalgamation of the trained bands, left the other matters for further consideration, and [pg 284] appointed a committee to confer with the Common Council and the officers of the trained bands the following afternoon.878
The City engages to guard the king against violence if brought to London. ”

“ We who enjoy the fruits of the long struggle maintained especially by London for the right of managing our own affairs, especially in the matter of taxation, cannot understand the tyrannies which the people of old had to endure from Kings and nobles. Richard II., for instance, forced the citizens to sign and seal blank 'charts'—try to imagine the Prime{144} Minister making the Lord Mayor, the Aldermen, the Common Council men, and all the more important merchants sign blank cheques to be filled in as he pleased! ”

“ Surely if there are these great and intolerable defects they ought to be remedied by the action of some genuine popular local authority. But we have got no genuine popular local authority....
“London, large as it is, is a natural unit—united by common features, united by common approximation, by common neighbourhood, by common dangers—depending upon common supplies, having common wants and common conveniences.
“... Unity of Government in the metropolis is the only method on which we can proceed for producing municipal reform.” ”

“ After considerable experience of the working of the twofold system, a select committee was appointed, on the motion of Mr. Ayrton, to inquire into the local government and taxation of London. Its report recommended that the name of the Metropolitan Board should be changed to that of Municipal Council; that the members should be chosen by direct election; that it should have control over the supply of gas and water, and generally exercise the authority of a civic corporation. Meanwhile Mr. J. S. Mill introduced a bill to incorporate the parliamentary boroughs ”

“ Under the shock of the surprise, London suddenly awoke to the consciousness of a corporate life. On every side men were stirred by an honest impulse to give the experiment a good start; to work the new machine for all it was worth; and to make the administration of Greater London a model for all lesser municipalities. The Divisions of London, for the purposes of its new Council, were the same as its Parliamentary Divisions, but each constituency returned two members, and the City four. ”

“ The wisdom of the Legislature cannot stoop to such elemental questions. It is unworthy of the wise and illustrious senators of this great empire to take heed of such a vulgar consideration as commercial morality. This is a free country, wherein every man may freely live, providing for himself, and warring upon his kind. Such throughout is the tone and the spirit of the proposed measure for the "better regulation" of the City of London. ”

“ Municipal Socialism is the watchword of the future; and instead of being jealous of the existing powers of the County Council, I would increase those powers tenfold; for without the widest kind of power, and even of despotic power, invested in some central authority, the chaotic expansion of London will go on to the enrichment of the few and the abiding injury of the many. ”

“ There is no one elected by, or responsible to the ratepayers.
“We propose to take London, as defined under the Metropolis Management Act, out of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, and Kent, and we propose to create it a County of London by itself, with a Lord Lieutenant, a Bench of Magistrates, and a County Council of its own.
“We propose that the Council shall be directly elected by the ratepayers, as in all other counties and boroughs—that the franchise shall be the same—and that it shall consist, as in all other cases, of elected and selected members ”

“ American cities have gone no further, although they presumably started at workingmen’s representation a hundred years ago, so completely were the founders misled by the name of government, and the temptation to substitute the form of political democracy for real self-government dealing with advancing social ideals. Even now London has twenty-eight Borough Councils, in addition to the London County Council itself, fifteen hundred direct representatives of the people, as over against seventy in Chicago although the latter city has a population one-half as large. ”

“ Thus the Queen's Men, in a petition written probably in the autumn of the following year, 1584, requested the Privy Council to dispatch "favorable letters unto the Lord Mayor of London to permit us to exercise within the city," and the Lord Mayor refused, with the significant remark that "if in winter ... the foulness of season do hinder the passage into the fields to play, the remedy is ill conceived to bring them into London." ”

“ Moved at the sad spectacle which met them on every side, the livery of London again met in Common Hall on the 29th November. They felt that it was useless to attempt to get an address received by the Regent in the manner they deemed proper; so they again passed resolutions urging all counties, corporate bodies, towns, wards and parishes throughout the kingdom to lay their grievances at the foot of the throne and before Parliament in a firm, temperate, and peaceable manner, with the view of eventually obtaining that economical and parliamentary reform they had so long and so anxiously desired. ”

“ As soon as responsibility is widely diffused in such a community, “deals” or bargains between politicians for the division of the offices at once begin.
In no community, homogeneous or heterogeneous, can public affairs be managed successfully when the supreme Legislature always stands ready to remodel the Charter whenever the minority in the City can command the support of the majority in the State. It is bad enough in London when the minority in the County Council can appeal to the majority in the House of Commons. ”