Municipium

“ This municipal assembly shall be the Council of Administration, which shall establish for the entire extent of its jurisdiction the rules of the common regime, and shall decide on all that concerns the municipal police, its internal security, sanitary policy, the management and use of municipal revenues, local expenditures, and generally all that is within the jurisdiction of the municipalities.
Art. 43. The active power shall be entirely, and for all the extent of the municipal district, in the hands of the mayor and his lieutenant, who shall be elected immediately by the primary assemblies. ”

“ The territorial legislature at least had the same authority as that possessed by congress to recognize claims of the nature described. It is a legislative power, and it was granted to the territorial legislature by the acts already referred to. A city is a municipal corporation and a political subdivision of the state, and, what the state could do itself, it has the power to direct its agent, the municipality, to do. ”

“ The successive stages of integration are the township or ward, which is the unit of organization; the county or province, which is an aggregation of townships or wards; and the national domain or territory, which is an aggregation of counties or provinces; the people of each of which are organized into a body politic. It taxed the Greeks and Romans to the extent of their capacities, after they had gained civilization, to invent the deme or township and the city ward; and thus inaugurate the second great plan of government, which remains among civilized nations to the present hour. ”

“ Again, a town is any collection of houses larger than a village; or any number of houses to which belongs a regular market, and which is not a city. (Johnson, Webster, Ogilvie.) The same authorities define a village as a small collection of houses in the country, less than a town. According to this distinction, the law, in giving power to 'any village, city, county, or township' to make donations and issue bonds to the railroad company, confers the power upon bodies of higher and lower degrees of municipal organization than towns, and leaves them out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ County councils were organized in every county of each state and within most of the counties community councils, usually with the school district serving as the unit, were formed. These community councils were not committees, but were the community itself, with all its citizens and agencies organized for coöperative, effective, national service. It was a neighborhood democracy made effective by organization and it established a direct means of reciprocal communication between the Government and the masses of the people. ”

“ The counties, with their chief cities, should be so many little independent communities, each with its legislative council, its law-courts, and its other institutions, employing and tasking the political energies and abilities of the citizens or inhabitants of the district. ”

“ The South is to-day and always has been a stranger to local self-government. In many of those states every justice of the peace, every school committeeman, every inspector of elections is appointed by some central power in the county, which is in turn itself appointed either by the Chief Executive of the State or by the dominant party in the Legislature. There may be the form of townships, but the differential characteristic is lacking—the self-governing element of the township. ”

“ The Borough Council, or County Borough Council, which differs from the Borough Council in that it controls the interests of a population of 50,000 or more inhabitants and enjoys more powers than an ordinary Municipal Council, holds and manages the property of the town, and may, with the consent of the Local Government Board, acquire fresh property. ”

“ And when one goes up the scale from the urban district and rural district boundaries, one finds equally crazy county arrangements, the same tangle of obstacle in the way of quick, effective co-ordinations, the same needless multiplicity of clerks, the same rich possibilities of litigation, misunderstanding, and deadlocks of opinion between areas whose only difference is that a mischievous boundary has been left in existence between them. ”

“ What a chance for the exercise of the arts of persuasion in procuring a contract, all the advantages of which should be on one side, but which must affect the interests of the county after it should have become well populated.
But we are not left to surmise on this subject. This small population was divided into seven civil townships, each one of which had a supervisor; and these supervisors, when assembled at the county seat, constituted the governing body of the county. ”

“ Now for the counties and the universities residence is not necessary; and even in the boroughs, where it is required, plural voting is restrained only in part, because a man may have more than one residence, and because residence within seven miles of the borough is enough, so that the men who carry on their business in the town and live in the suburbs are qualified in the borough by reason of their offices or workshops, and in a suburban borough or the county by reason of their dwellings. ”

“ From the outset the government of the township was vested in the TOWN-MEETING,--an institution which in its present form is said to be peculiar to New England, but which, as we shall see, has close analogies with local self-governing bodies in other ages and countries. Once in each year--usually in the month of March--a meeting is held, at which every adult male residing within the limits of the township is expected to be present, and is at liberty to address the meeting or to vote upon any question that may come up. ”

“ Establishment of municipalities.
We have seen so far that in each commune the national representation for the legislature, and the provincial representation for the general administration, draw their elements from the primary assemblies. These two establishments together make up the great national edifice. It is on the same basis, that is, on the same foundation of the primary assemblies, that a second political edifice must be built, which is the municipal constitution. ”

“ I have not, in this paper, attempted to describe the actual condition of any particular municipality, or even presented a picture which could represent the material existence of the cities as a whole. Such a picture would only be a necessary part of a study of institutions when the city itself was the unit to be investigated, and not of one whose chief object is to prove that the city as such had no constitutional existence, but simply formed a part of another institutional unit. ”

“ In our country all power resides in the people, and the township provides a convenient means of ascertaining their wishes and of executing their will. The farther away the government, the less will be the people's power; the nearer the government, the greater will be the people's power. The township system enables each community to attend to its own local affairs--a work which no other agency can do so well--to remove readily and speedily its local public grievances, and to obtain readily and speedily its local public needs. ”

“ A mere village has no claim to a municipal representation. By a village I mean a place whose inhabitants are not markedly distinguished by occupation or social relations from those of the rural districts adjoining, and for whose local wants the arrangements made for the surrounding territory will suffice. Such small places have rarely a sufficient public to furnish a tolerable municipal council: if they contain any talent or knowledge applicable to public business, it is apt to be all concentrated in some one man, who thereby becomes the dominator of the place. ”

“ Creation, Appointment and Qualifications. Each city and incorporated village is hereby authorized and empowered to create a commission to be known as the city or village planning commission. Such commission shall be so created in incorporated villages by resolution of the trustees, in cities by ordinance of the common council, except that in cities of the first class, having more than a million inhabitants, it shall be by resolution of the board of estimate and apportionment or other similar local authority. ”

“ They have duties, as citizens of a township or civil district, as citizens of a county, as citizens of some one of the States, and as citizens of the United States. All persons are, or have been, members of a family; some also live under a village or city government; and most children are subject to the government, of some school. Many people in this country live under six governments--namely, the family, the township or civil district, the village or city, the county, the State, and the United States ”

“ In old English boroughs the responsible men—those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives—were the burgesses. Bearing always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred, we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for military purposes; it was about such a community as could furnish to the general levy a [Pg 228] company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court. ”

“ As other prominent citizens followed their example the municipalities were richly provided with useful and ornamental public works donated by the richer classes. Thus the municipal offices, being unsalaried, were a heavy drain upon the resources of their holders, but at the same time they offered almost the sole opportunity for gratifying the [pg 285] political ambitions of the population of the provinces. In addition to these civil officials, each community had its colleges of pontiffs and augurs. ”

“ Through their officers, the people of the township act freely together within the lawful sphere of the township. The common wants of the township are attended to by the people through their officers, who compose the centre around which all township action revolves.
A number of townships, having common wants, are erected into a county. The county officers and county court form the harmonizing centre of this larger organization.
A number of counties, having common wants, are erected into a State, with a State government. ”

“ But each of the others, each department, district, and municipality, had its own little constitution, based upon popular election, but with many varieties and complexities of form. Every department, district, and municipality had its own council or deliberative body, and its own executive officers too. The officials of the municipalities were elected directly by the citizens within them. But the higher officials of the districts and departments were, like the deputies to the National Assembly, elected by a double system of election. ”

“ All the active citizens of the municipalized communal district shall form themselves into primary assemblies, to nominate one deputy by each primary assembly; and these deputies together shall compose, in the commune seat town, the municipal assembly of the entire district. ”

“ On the other hand, it must be recognized that for many purposes the community, or even the township, is too small a unit to secure the greatest efficiency in administration of public agencies, and so there has been a distinct tendency toward the centralization of many functions of local government in county officials. ”

“ With the new municipalities, a really autonomous and decentralized municipal government will be established in the towns, since no provincial assembly is created in the capitals of the provinces or districts, and each municipality is the legitimate administrator of the interests of its town, and will keep, preserve, and expend for the public welfare of the municipal funds. ”

“ The local interests and improvements of the counties are apt to be neglected, the county interest is easily thrown into the scale of any party or faction,—more especially if that party or faction be subservient to the administration,—and, as the county member, when ministerial, has great influence over all the government offices and patronage connected with the county, the chances are, that these will be bestowed upon persons who are either ignorant of their duties, from a want of local knowledge, or disliked [170] by the independent proprietors upon party grounds. ”

“ The great boroughs were honeycombed with sokes, or areas of seignorial jurisdiction, within which the royal reeve’s authority was greatly restricted while that of the lord’s reeve took precedence. Even the haws, being “burhs” or strongholds within a stronghold, enjoyed a local “peace” which protected from official intrusion. Besides heterogeneity of tenure and jurisdiction in the borough, there was also heterogeneity of status; there were burh-thegns and cnihts, mercatores, burgesses of various kinds, the three groups representing perhaps military, commercial and agricultural elements. ”