Maire

“ In a city of the first class, a mayor, two aldermen from each ward, a police judge, and a treasurer who may be ex officio tax-collector are elected, and an attorney, a clerk, a chief of police, an assessor, a street commissioner, a jailer, a surveyor, and, where there is a paid fire department, a chief engineer with one or more assistants, may be appointed by the mayor with the consent of the council. ”

“ The presence of the village officers tends to preserve the peace and make crime less frequent.
OFFICERS.--The usual officers of the village or borough are the trustees or councilmen, whose duties are mostly legislative; the marshal, and sometimes a president or mayor; a collector and a treasurer, whose duties are executive; and the recorder, or police judge, or justices of the peace, whose duties are judicial. The officers are usually elected by the legal voters, and serve for a term of one or two years. ”

“ The Village President, who serves one year, is the chief executive, and serves without pay. He is the head of the village board of trustees, and in small villages is the head of the police. Local order, peace, health, and sanitation depend on him. ”

“ The government is vested in a mayor, elected biennially, and a unicameral council which confirms the mayor's appointments of members of the fire department, including the chief, and of the police force, excepting the chief, who is chosen by the people. ”

“ A mayor and various other executive officers and a legislative unicameral council are elected for four years. The mayor and the heads of departments consult as a “cabinet.” Various boards—of civil service, public debt, education, health, police, fire, drainage, water and sewerage and state commissioners of the port—control many of the most important interests of the city. ”

“ Every large town has a mayor and deputy mayor, appointed by the government, and a town council, of whom one third are similarly appointed, while the citizens choose the rest; a proportionate number of councillors representing each religious community. ”

“ Let us make our own selections—or, rather, help our mayor to make hers—and show this town what can be done with an honest and sane council, every man of whom has at heart the framing of a model municipality and the development of an ideal city. ”

“ Each rural parish, and each town, forms a commune or municipality in which all who pay the local taxes are voters. Each commune has a communal or municipal council. The communal assembly or municipal council decides on all questions of administration, police and communal economy. ”

“ The executive powers, which in the country districts are vested in the fogeds, in the towns are committed to the judges of the courts of first instance. The management of the affairs of the parish is placed in the hands of a council, chosen by the peasants, which deliberates on all matters which concern the parish, such as the making of new roads, the application to the central government for assistance, and the repairing of the parish church. ”

“ With only a fourth of the population they will hold three fourths of the public offices, have the majority in the municipal council, the mayor of the commune, if not the adjunct, the highest grades in the national guard, the member of the conseil-général, the deputy, sometimes the senator, and the most widely circulating journal of the district, daily filled with eulogiums on their merit. ”

“ In some cases the greater part of a village is composed of parties who rank as chiefs, but, as a general rule, it consists of certain families of the more common order, which we have just mentioned, and some titled chief, to whom the village looks up as their political head and protector. It is usual, in the courtesies of common conversation, for all to call each other chiefs. If you listen to the talk of little boys even, you will hear them addressing each other as chief this, that, and the other thing. ”

“ In case the mayor and president shall be absent from any meeting of the common council, they shall proceed to elect a temporary presiding officer, who, for the time being, shall discharge the duties of mayor. The president, or temporary presiding officer, while presiding over the council or performing the duties of mayor, shall be styled 'acting mayor,' and acts performed by them shall have the same force and validity as if performed by the mayor.' 'Chapter 3, § 3. ”

“ Every governor must present annually a list, revised by the priest of the district, of all the inhabitants in his district of both sexes, and of those of their children who are old enough to help in the fields. ”

“ To these councils, elected by the working-classes from themselves, are entrusted the governing of the parish: the lighting, paving, cleaning of the streets, the order and police, and all matters belonging to the daily life of the place. On these councils the squire and the parson may sit, if they are elected; but they have no more power than the others. ”

“ A Bürgermeister, once elected, becomes a member of the bureaucracy and is responsible to the central administration; even the headman of a village commune is, within the narrow limits of his functions, a government official. ”

“ The number of these are yearly about two hundred, who at sun-setting meet on the Row, the most open part of the town, where the Mayor’s serjeant-at-mace gives them an oath, the tenor wherof followeth in these words: ‘You shall well and truly keep this town till to-morrow at the sun-rising; you shall come into no house without license or cause reasonable. Of all manner of casualties, of fire, of crying of children, you shall due warning make to the parties, as the case shall require. ”

“ The Mayor and the Councilmen shall make oath to favor no person by reason of friendship, and to render an equitable decision in all matters, according to their powers; all others shall take the oath of obedience and to sustain with arms the decisions of the Mayor and Councilmen. When the bell of the belfry shall sound to assemble the Commune, anyone who does not attend shall pay a fine of twelve sous. ”

“ The government of the village is purely democratic. All the people meet and vote for their village magistrate, who decides, with the aid of a council of the elders, all the questions which arise within its confines, one of them being the division of the land. ”

“ Municipalities are established in the district or sub-district capital towns, and wherever there is a population sufficiently large and enlightened to be entitled to municipal rights.12 A president (mayor) , vice-president, or councillor must be between twenty-six and sixty-five years of age, and must intelligently speak, read, and write Spanish, English, or the principal local dialect. Ecclesiastics, soldiers in active service, and persons receiving emolument from public funds are debarred from these offices. ”

“ The Lord Mayor is looked up to by the inhabitants of Little Britain as the greatest potentate upon earth, his gilt coach with six horses as the summit of human splendor, and his procession, with all the sheriffs and aldermen in his train, as the grandest of earthly pageants. ”

“ The streets, wards, and Locations in, at, or adjoining the villages or standdorpen pointed out and surveyed as places of residence and business for the said persons, which do not form part of such villages or standdorpen, and which do not fall under the local authorities or board of management, shall, as from now, form part of such villages or standdorpen, and are placed under such authority or board, be it the local Landdrost, Mining Commissioner, Responsible Clerk, or any Town Council, or Town Board. ”

“ Still, if Newgate's doom'd to go,
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor,
To the Carliol Croft—heigh-ho!
Mr. Mayor,
As sure as you're alive,
(And long, sir, may you thrive,)
The shock we'll ne'er survive,
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor. ”

“ The whole of this business was managed with the height of discretion; and the weavers, and spinners, and farming lads, vied with one another who should be first on the list. But that which the most surprised me, was the wonderful sagacity of the committee in naming the gentlemen that should be the officers. I could not have made a better choice myself; for they were the best built, the best bred, and the best natured, in the parish. ”

“ From the neatness of the town, the incomparable walks and rides about it, its rendezvous of Ministers and politicks, it is a very agreeable place to live in. The Ministers here by turns hold assemblies of the men at their houses, morning and evening, and I have dined at the house of one or other of them almost every day. ”

“ You must know that the corporation of our town have lately elected a new mayor, a person of many qualifications—big and portly, with a voice like Boanerges; a religious man, the possessor of an immense pew; loyal, so much so that I once heard him say that he would at any time go three miles to hear any one sing ‘God save the King;’ moreover, a giver of excellent dinners. Such is our present mayor; who, owing to his loyalty, his religion, and a little, perhaps, to his dinners, is a mighty favourite ”

“ The municipal and internal affairs are managed by a provincial assembly elected by the people. Every villa or borough throughout the province also possesses its municipal council, and in thinly-populated districts, the inhabitants choose every four years a justice of the peace who adjudicates in small disputes between neighbours. ”

“ Naturally, the one particular event to which an Alderman looks forward with the most especial anticipations of honour and renown, is the year of his Mayoralty, when he will have his otherwise humble name associated with those of the famous men who, in very different times to those in which we live, ruled the great City, with courage and discretion. ”

“ The feeble efforts of a worn out man to serve them can never answer their sanguine expectations. I will do my best, and will sacrifice ease and retirement, the chief comfort of old age, to their wishes. I do accept the office of lord [Pg 91] mayor. I shall hope for the assistance of your Lordship and my brethren the Court of Aldermen. ”

“ In 1292 we find the mayor and commonalty claiming the right to elect a coroner and to have tolls of markets and fairs. In 1685 the governing body comprised a mayor, aldermen, a town clerk, burgesses of the common council, a coroner and subordinate officers. ”

“ Tradition declares that the mayor, when he had [193] read the Proclamation, drank ale from a silver flagon, and that thereupon the bustle and business of the fair began. I believe as a matter of fact the proclamation was usually read by the Lord Mayor’s attorney, and repeated after him by the sheriff’s officer, in the presence of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and sheriffs. The officers of the Lord Mayor’s household afterwards dined at the Sword-bearer’s table. This may have become the custom at a later date. See 1688. ”

“ Against May-day every parish, town, or village assemble themselves, both men, women, and children; and either all together, or dividing themselves into companies, they goe, some to the woods and groves, some to the hills and mountains, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing with them birche boughs and branches of trees to deck their assemblies withal. ”

“ The mayor to be chosen out of the eight Magistrates that are free-men; and also with sending two Members, to sit as their Representatives in Parliament, who are to be chosen by the Mayor, Magistrates, and Freemen, or the major part of them; by election of which, if common fame be true, the townsmen have in the last ages reaped great gain and advantage. ”

“ The municipalities of to-day—I know not how many men whose time they absorb, but they are very different from the municipalities of my boyhood, and I suspect that if a Town Councillor of forty or fifty years ago were to present himself in a Town Council of to-day, he would regard their work with astonishment, and they perhaps might look at him with some surprise. ”

“ The Parish Councils have become the guardians of public paths; they have begun to provide parish libraries, and the little parish senate educates its constituency and brings its wisdom to bear upon a number of practical questions, such as cottage gardens and fairs. ”

“ In a parish not having a separate parish council the chairman of the parish meeting and the proper officer of the district council shall be a body corporate by the name of ‘the Parish Trustees’ with the addition of the name of the parish. ”

“ In no department is the contrast greater between the old world and the new than in municipal government. In the former the families reside for generations in the place of birth with increasing devotion to the town and all its surroundings. A father achieving the mayorship stimulates the son to aspire to it. ”

“ Gradually the office of the rural secretary becomes a sort of clearing house for all the popular interests and organizations in the county,—churches, schools, granges, farmers’ institutes, boards of trade, medical societies, Sunday schools, boys’ clubs of every sort, athletic clubs, civic associations and village improvement societies. ”

“ The chief of this village is a large man, five feet ten inches or six feet tall, with a very long flat face and abruptly tapering forehead, small, bright, cunning eyes, and childishly good-natured and wide-awake to everything curious. ”