Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Municipality

MUNICIPALITY. A municipality is an organization for the self-government of a city or town by means of a corporation empowered generally to maintain peace and order, and to manage the affairs of the inhabitants. Such a corporation consists of a head as a mayor or provost, and of superior members as aldermen and councillors, together with the simple corporators who are represented by the governing body; it acts as a person by its common seal and has a perpetual succession with power to hold lands subject to the restrictions of the Mortmain Laws, and it can sue or be sued or be indicted, although there are of course many personal matters which do not come within the functions and liabilities of such bodies politic. Where necessary for its primary objects, every corporation has power to make byelaws and to enforce them by penalties, provided they are not unjust or unreasonable or otherwise inconsistent with the objects of the incorporation or charter or other instrument of foundation; and in the case of a municipality such byelaws will be binding even upon strangers within the district.

Great Britain has no general system of self-government. A certain number of cities and towns have been from time to time incorporated by the crown, or have successfully claimed the privilege as existing from time immemorial, either because in fact they have governed themselves from very ancient times, or because they have had such a representation in parliament as led to a presumption of their having been incorporated like the rest. The other urban districts have been regarded as mere &ldquo;upland towns&rdquo; or populous townships, with nothing but a parochial organization, or the faint semblance of municipal institutions which grew out of the administration of fairs and markets. These are now comprised in the various local government districts existing under the Public Health Acts, &ldquo;lighting and watching districts&rdquo; constituted under an Act passed for the purpose in 1833, and improvement districts governed under the powers given by a number of local Acts. Provision has been made by the Acts which regulate these corporations for the grant of powers of self-government to new municipal boroughs subject to the approval of the committee of the privy council. The making of corporations, however, is regarded as one of the highest prerogatives of the crown, and the legislature has always been careful to avoid unnecessary interference with the right; the functions of the committee are therefore confined to the allowance or refusal of municipal powers as constituted by statute, the right of the crown to make corporations of other kinds being left in theory untouched.

The term &ldquo;municipal borough&rdquo; was introduced when the larger corporations were reformed in 1835 to denote a place to which the new powers of self-government were applied, whether such a place were a parliamentary borough or not. It has now become nearly equivalent to &ldquo;municipality&rdquo; owing to the provisions of the Act of 1883 for extinguishing the less important of the small unreformed municipalities, and for bringing the rest within the purview of the Municipal Corporations Act, 1882, by which the provisions of the statute of 1835 and its forty-two amending Acts were consolidated. The meaning of the word &ldquo;borough&rdquo; has undergone many changes. It seems at first to have denoted a walled town or city, but it was soon applied especially to such of them as possessed some kind of organization for the transaction of the local business. At a later period the term implied the right to be represented in parliament. This may be illustrated by the proceedings in the case of Torrington in the reign of Edward III. This place, whether a &ldquo;burgh&rdquo; or a mere &ldquo;vill,&rdquo; had in fact sent burgesses to parliament, but after it was determined that such representation was improper the town was omitted from the category of boroughs. In

summoning the commons to parliament each sheriff was directed to procure the election of two citizens from every city and two burgesses from every borough in his bailiwick. But it soon became the practice to omit places which had been represented, and to include others with no title to the privilege except their situation on the royal demesnes, or their political or commercial importance. It resulted that the word &ldquo;borough&rdquo; came to denote only those places which were usually represented in parliament, whether they were walled towns or not, and whether they had or had not received charters of incorporation; and in course of time it was taken for granted that every parliamentary borough must have been incorporated at some ancient time, or in other words was entitled to the privileges of a borough by prescription. The first Reform Act changed the meaning of the word again by depriving the smaller boroughs of their parliamentary functions and reducing them to the same position as those districts which were known as boroughs in a popular sense, as having originally had a representation which had been lost, or as being important places enjoying municipal rights under charters like those which had been granted to the parliamentary boroughs.

We shall now proceed to describe the ordinary constitution of an English municipal borough, omitting the small municipalities which are now in course of extinguishment, and for other reasons omitting the city of London, which, on account of its singular importance and its peculiar circumstances, will probably become without much delay the subject of separate legislation (see ).

These boroughs are governed by corporations composed in each case of a mayor, aldermen, and burgesses, acting by a council elected by the general body of qualified corporators. If the borough is a city, the burgesses are described as the &ldquo;citizens.&rdquo; With a few exceptions arising under local Acts, the following description applies to all the municipal boroughs in England and Wales, similar provisions having been made for the boroughs of Scotland and Ireland (see vol. iv. p. 63) by Acts of Parliament passed for those parts of the United Kingdom. The powers and duties of the council are defined by the Municipal Corporations Act, 1882, which forms a complete municipal code. The number of councillors varies from twelve to forty-eight according to the size of the borough, and in the case of a new incorporation the number is fixed by a provision in the charter. The qualification of a councillor is to be an enrolled resident burgess, or, if not resident within the district, residing within 15 miles of the borough and having in either case the property qualification required by the Act, provided that he is not a clergyman or a regular dissenting minister, or interested in any office, place, or contract with which the corporation is concerned. The qualification of a burgess is to be enrolled on the burgess-roll as the rate-paying occupier of a house or other building in the borough or within 7 miles distance from it. Women may be burgesses, but are not qualified for corporate office. In many boroughs there are ancient classes of freemen qualified as such by birth, servitude, or marriage (and formerly in many cases qualified by gift or purchase); but these freemen as such have not the rights of burgesses, though they are entitled to the parliamentary franchise and to their share in the charities and corporation property under titles accruing to their class before the reform of 1835. The qualification of an alderman is the same as that of a councillor, and the mayor is chosen from the aldermen, or councillors, or persons qualified for such positions.

The councillors hold office for three years, one-third of their number being annually renewed by ballot. If the borough is divided into wards, an alderman acts as returning-officer for the elections in each ward; if not, the mayor

acts as the returning-officer for the borough. Municipal elections fall within the provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act, 1883. The aldermen hold office for six years, one-half of their number retiring every three years in rotation. The mayor holds office for one year. His election is the first business at the quarterly meeting held on the 9th day of November, when the amount of his remuneration is fixed by the council. He is the only member of the corporation who receives a salary. The council chooses the mayor and aldermen and appoints the officers of the corporation, as the town-clerk and treasurer, the sheriff when the borough is a county of itself, and the coroner and clerk of the peace when it has separate quarter-sessions. The council appoints such general and special committees as may be required, and has the general management of the corporate property, subject to the supervision of the treasury; it makes all necessary byelaws, subject to disallowance by the privy council if necessary. With exceptions arising from the provisions of local Acts, the council regulates the police force, the lighting and watching of the borough, the management of markets and burial-grounds, and the execution of the laws relating to public health. The expenses are defrayed out of the borough fund, which includes the income of the general corporate estate, supplemented by a borough-rate paid out of the poor-rate or assessed upon a similar basis. A watch-rate, if required, may be levied on the whole borough or on a selected portion of the district. When expenditure is required for objects of a permanent character, the council is empowered to raise the amount by loans, charged on the rates and repayable by instalments, subject to the approval of the treasury or other public department entrusted with the control of the matter, according to the nature of the improvement required. The whole of the accounts are audited by borough auditors, of whom one must be a councillor appointed by the mayor, and the other two elected by the burgesses from persons qualified to be councillors. A return is made to the Local Government Board of the receipts and expenditure for the year, and an abstract of all these returns is laid every year before parliament. Some control over the expenditure is also reserved to the High Court of Justice by a provision that all orders for payment must be signed by three councillors and the town-clerk, and that any such order may be moved by certiorari into the Queen's Bench Division. The aldermen have no greater powers than other councillors, excepting that they may act as the returning-officers for wards as above mentioned, and that an alderman may act for the mayor if he is temporarily unable to discharge his duty and has not appointed a deputy. The mayor is the head of the corporation, and is ex officio a magistrate for the borough and a member of the watch committee. He is the returning-officer at parliamentary elections, and acts with two elected revising assessors as the revising officer if the borough is not represented in parliament. His office is vacated by death or bankruptcy, and must be filled up with all convenient speed after any such vacancy occurs. The last ex-mayor is also ex officio a magistrate for the borough.

Where the borough has a separate commission of the peace, the borough justices, with the last-mentioned exceptions, are appointed by the crown. A separate commission does not of itself exempt the borough from the concurrent jurisdiction of the county justices. A stipendiary magistrate may be appointed by a secretary of state on the application of the council, and when appointed he is ex officio a justice for the borough. When the borough has a separate court of quarter-sessions the recorder is the judge, but in certain cases may appoint an assistant or deputy; the recorder must be a barrister of five years' standing, and

is appointed by the crown on the recommendation of the home secretary; the recorder is also ex officio a justice for the borough. When the borough has such a court it ceases to be liable to the county-rate, but must contribute to the expenses arising from prosecution and conviction of prisoners from the borough at the assizes. In the case of boroughs which were liable before 1832 to contribute to the county-rate, a contribution to the expenses of the county is still required. Subject to an exception as to judges and assessors appointed before 1835, and to the provisions of various local Acts, the recorder is the judge of any civil court existing in the borough by prescription.

We shall now discuss more generally the origin of these municipalities upon the Continent as well as in the United Kingdom. The conception of the borough as it now exists has obviously been copied from the Roman municipium. As to England, however, the coincidence is in one sense accidental, inasmuch as it had a municipal system before the lawyers adopted the notion of a corporation from the civilians, though it may be true that no such system could grow up without being influenced by ideas which were familiar to the churchmen. In some parts of the West the Roman system appears to have lived on without an actual breach of continuity. The &ldquo;curia&rdquo; seems to have continued in the cities of Provence until the outbreak of the great revolution. At Treves and Cologne &ldquo;the Roman language perished, but the institutions survived;&rdquo; and the libertas Romana or full body of municipal privileges was extended gradually to other cities on the Rhine and the trading communities of Holland and Brabant. It is possible also that some relics of the imperial administration may have continued in southern Italy and in a few of the Lombard cities. One element at least in the corporation of Paris can be traced back to the Nautæ Parisiaci, a college of merchants established in the first period of the empire. But the English municipalities are in no sense a legacy from the imperial times, or a continuation of the system which prevailed in the cities of Britain, even in the few instances, as in London, York, and Exeter, where there may have been an unbroken succession of occupancy. Almost all the towns were destroyed in the course of the English conquest, and some which became important again, as Bath, Cambridge, and Chester, are known to have lain waste for centuries. In other instances the English kings soon learned to hold their courts in the fortresses, and to set up their farmsteads in the desolated palaces, or elsewhere a Roman camp may have been taken as a convenient point for a garrison, which in time became a &ldquo;civil centre&rdquo; and the site of a municipal borough.

The French municipalities can be traced to several distinct sources of origin. The chief activity was in the north; the southern cities kept their Roman traditions or imitated the Italian model, as those in the east endeavoured to secure the same privileges as the mercantile communities on the Rhine; in the central provinces the towns for the most part retained the organization of the parish, and were rather bourgeoisies or privileged market-towns than communes with powers of self-government. The rise of the communes began under Philip I., and they became general in the 13th century. The first charter was granted to Le Mans in 1072, and another to Cambray in 1076; these were followed by grants to Laon, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, and many other places; and similar privileges were granted in the 12th century by the counts of Flanders, the dukes of Burgundy, and other princes, &mdash; the general effect of the grants being to fix the lord's rent or tribute, to commute the military service, and to give jurisdiction to magistrates either freely elected or chosen by the townsmen in conjunction with their feudal lords.

of these charters can be seen in the Ordonnances des Rois, Kemble's Anglo-Saxons, and Bouthors's Coutumes locales du Baillage d'Amiens. They show us a political revolution directed against the feudal lord by townsmen associated in merchant-guilds or sworn into a new sort of brotherhood. To break the oath of loyalty to the commune is a crime of the gravest kind. &ldquo;If any of us aid or comfort our enemies he is guilty of lèse-commune, and we will pull down his house, if we can. . . . Whoever wounds with weapon any of his fellows shall lose his fist or pay nine livres&rdquo; (Amiens). &ldquo;The men shall take what wives they please, first asking leave; if their lord refuse, and a man take a wife from another lordship, he shall pay but five sous for a fine. Every one living within the district shall take the communal oath or answer with house or goods&rdquo; (Soissons). These charters are important because the communa of London was founded under Richard I. in direct imitation of the French example, and soon became the type of the independence which the other boroughs continually struggled to attain; and, as in France, the great men deplored the revolt as tumor plebis, timor regis, tepor sacerdotii, while the kings for their own purposes encouraged the popular movement. And in the same way Philip Augustus and his successors were so ready to protect the communes that they eventually claimed and obtained an immediate seigniory over all the chartered boroughs to the exclusion of any private lords to whom the towns had formerly belonged. Another point of importance lies in the fact that the lords not only settled the local laws of inheritance and other customs &ldquo;running with the land,&rdquo; but sometimes changed them at the townsmen's request, as if it were merely an affair between lord and tenant. There are English examples of the same practice, which seems to have been not entirely discontinued until the reign of Edward I. A prerogative of this nature was exercised by the archbishop in Kent, and Simon de Montfort in 1255, at the request of his burgesses of Leicester, abolished the custom of descent to the youngest son. Fitzosberne appears by Domesday Book to have granted a separate set of customs to his &ldquo;Frenchmen&rdquo; in Hereford, and a difference of the same kind which existed at Stafford and Nottingham must have been caused by similar grants; in the latter place it was found on a trial in the reign of Edward III. that there were two districts in the town, the one called the &ldquo;French borough&rdquo; and the other the &ldquo;English borough,&rdquo; where descent was to the youngest son, a circumstance which gave its name to the custom of &ldquo;borough-English.&rdquo;

Municipal freedom was granted in Spain at an earlier date and on an ampler scale, as beseemed the poverty of the kings, the weakness of the nobles, and the constant danger from the Moors. The Visigothic laws were imbued with the principles of the Theodosian code, and it was easy for the Spaniards to regard the incorporated cities as bodies politic of the highest importance. The first instance of the erection of such a community was the grant in 1020 of a code of privileges to Leon. Such grants were treaties between the king and the chartered towns, by which the latter obtained fixed laws, extensive territories, and the choice of their own magistrates in return for a tribute and universal service in the militia. The king appointed a governor to take charge of the fortified places, but in almost every other respect the inhabitants governed themselves. This democratic constitution was after a time impaired by the claims of the knights or &ldquo;caballeros&rdquo; to a monopoly of office; but what actually led to its destruction was the increase in the power of the crown. The disorders inseparable from popular elections were declared, as in England under the Tudors, to be a reason for vesting the government in a small and close corporation, which

was soon found to be quite amenable to the influence and dictation of the court.

The municipalities of every country have a separate history of their own, and it is difficult to find any general law for determining their methods of development. According to their opportunities the oppressed wear out their conquerors' patience and too often become oppressors in their turn: as the state becomes more complex the old confederacies are broken up, and the scattered communities are reduced to order by a central government, and as privilege begins to disappear the towns are regulated by a common set of rules, or the whole country, as in France, is parcelled out again into a new series of communes or corporate districts. In Spain, as we have seen, the needs of the state gave immediate freedom to its defenders. In Italy the cities grew too soon into a crowd of independent republics. The history of Lincoln and Exeter and the cities of the Danelagh shows that &ldquo;the tendency of the great cities of England was towards a more than municipal independence&rdquo; (Freeman, Engl. Towns, p. 206). If these movements had not been checked by the Norman Conquest, English history might have been &ldquo;like that of the imperial kingdoms.&rdquo; But, as this event turned out, there is little in the record of the German cities which bears upon that of English municipalities, excepting some slight resemblances between the powers acquired by the city of London and those of the Hanse towns and the mercantile principalities of Nuremberg and Augsburg. The free cities of Germany were at first divided between the emperors and their immediate vassals, the former ruling through the bishops as imperial vicars; in the 12th century the citizens began to elect councils and to administer a concurrent jurisdiction; in the next century they either purchased full powers or drove out the vicars and bailiffs by force; the revolutions which followed the fall of the Hohenstauffen family enabled the cities to free themselves from the mediate lords and to hold directly of the empire, and they were soon afterwards admitted to the diet on equal terms with the rest of its sovereign constituents.

The borough when it appears in English history is essentially a place of defence, and the definition includes the powerful city which formed the metropolis of an ancient kingdom, the border-fortress, the walled seaport, the &ldquo;burh&rdquo; erected in a disaffected province, and the fortified village on the private demesne of the king. There is another sense of the word &ldquo;borough,&rdquo; as used in Kent and the neighbouring counties, to denote the small rural division which is elsewhere called a &ldquo;tithing,&rdquo; the constable or tithing-man being the same officer as the &ldquo;borsholder&rdquo; or &ldquo;borough-elder&rdquo; of the eastern counties; but the verbal similarity is accidental, the rural &ldquo;borough&rdquo; having been the district of the &ldquo;frank-pledges&rdquo; or neighbours under a pledge or &ldquo;borh&rdquo; to act as bail for each other. The borough or &ldquo;burh&rdquo; was confined to the precinct of the walls, though the town or city might extend to a greater distance, or the burgesses might be joint-owners of estates outside the lines of defence. There might even be two &ldquo;burhs&rdquo; side by side if the nature of the locality required it. We read in the Chronicle, for instance, of the construction of the &ldquo;northern burh&rdquo; at Hertford in 913, and of &ldquo;burhs&rdquo; being built five years later on both sides of the river at Buckingham; and many other examples will be found collected in Kemble's list of the towns.

Little is known of the civil constitution of the boroughs before the Norman Conquest, and even the Domesday survey fails to give much information as to their internal affairs where the king's rights were not immediately concerned. It appears indeed that Lincoln and the other cities of the Danelagh were almost independent; an aristocratic commonwealth in each case was governed by twelve

hereditary judges, and the same kind of organization, but with a less degree of independence, appeared at Chester and Ipswich. The size and the wealth or power of places like Canterbury, Taunton, and Sandwich entitled them to be treated as separate &ldquo;hundreds,&rdquo; and the constitution of London must have been based on that of a shire; but, speaking generally, it may be said that the ordinary boroughs were without any powers of self-government. Each borough was administered as if it were a township or cluster of townships, intersected in most cases by a number of separate jurisdictions and subject to the obligations of tenure which bound many of the burgesses to lordships outside the walls. The borough-courts were held by the reeve or bailiff, who may have been in many cases elected, but was always answerable to an external authority. If the place was of mercantile importance it was called a port (from &ldquo;porta,&rdquo; the city-gate), and the court and its president, as in London, Canterbury, and Bath, were styled the &ldquo;port-mote&rdquo; and &ldquo;port-reeve.&rdquo; In the smaller boroughs the reeve's functions must have resembled those of the steward in the ordinary manorial courts. When municipal rights were granted by the Plantagenet kings this officer was replaced by the &ldquo;mayor,&rdquo; whose appearance is always the sign of the establishment of an independent commune. The first steps toward self-government were taken when the burgesses became the owners, as at Oxford and Colchester, of property which they managed in common. But a more important source of municipal privilege is to be found in the institution of the guilds, which in time acquired the control and monopoly of the local commerce, so that in the reign of Henry II. the possession of a merchant-guild, or &ldquo;hanse&rdquo; as it was called in the north, became &ldquo;the token of municipal independence,&rdquo; the guild being in fact (if not in theory) the governing body of the town. The courts in later times have accordingly held, as in the case of Totnes, that the grant of gilda mercatoria implies the incorporation of the borough. The guilds appear first in a religious form, and date in all probability from the times when the neighbours met to drink at the pagan festivals or the feasts in honour of the dead. Other voluntary associations of the same kind were formed as clubs and friendly societies for mutual insurance and defence. The &ldquo;frith-gild&rdquo; of London, as it existed in the reign of Athelstane, and the later &ldquo;knighten-guild,&rdquo; the &ldquo;thanes' guild&rdquo; at Cambridge, and the guilds of Canterbury and Exeter were all fraternities of this kind. The &ldquo;chapman-guild&rdquo; (&ldquo;hanse&rdquo;- or merchant-guild) was an association on the same model but on a larger scale, comprising all the traders in the town, and assuming the power to make bylaws to regulate all the local business which did not fall within the jurisdiction of the regular courts. The London knighten-guild, until it was suppressed by Henry I., had a legal jurisdiction in the district of Portsoken Ward. The ancient descriptions of Winchester mention two knighten-guilds where the &ldquo;probi homines&rdquo; were wont to drink their guild (&ldquo;potabant gildam suam&rdquo;). The &ldquo;gildhalla&rdquo; of the men of Dover is mentioned in Domesday Book. When the boroughs were enfranchised as communes upon the French model care was taken to confirm and establish these trading fraternities as forming the most important members of the new corporations. Thus in 1200 King John granted to the burgesses of Nottingham &ldquo;a merchant-guild with all the liberties and free customs which ought to pertain thereto,&rdquo; and the grant to Ipswich in the same reign, besides preserving and extending the jurisdiction of the twelve &ldquo;portmen&rdquo; or capital burgesses, provides that the common council shall elect a fit man to be alderman of the merchant-guild. The same king granted to Dublin the right of having guilds &ldquo;as in Bristol.&rdquo; York and Beverley had the right to have a &ldquo;hans-hus&rdquo;

some time before, in the latter case by the grant of Archbishop Thurstan in the reign of Henry I.

Another valuable franchise was obtained when the boroughs procured a separate assessment of their dues to the crown. Except in the case of the most important cities, the boroughs were regarded as parts of the counties in which they were situate and as answerable accordingly to the sheriff. It was of the highest importance to the burgesses that their share of the county-dues should be ascertained, and even before the Norman Conquest it be came the practice for the borough to answer for its own dues under the name of firma burgi. The Domesday survey shows that Dover, Sandwich, Bath, Huntingdon, and many other boroughs had obtained a privilege of this kind. A borough paying its fixed assessment to the king or other lord, through the reeve or alderman of the merchant-guild, was regarded as a single tenant holding the borough for years or at will or in perpetuity, according to the nature of the contract. When its dues and services were assessed in perpetuity the borough was said to be &ldquo;affirmed&rdquo; or held in fee-farm, and the burgesses were thenceforth treated as freeholders by a burgage tenure. The only rights remaining to complete their municipal independence were attained when the sheriff's jurisdiction was ousted and the burgesses were allowed to elect their own magistrates to administer justice in the local courts. In the reign of Henry III. the great lords began to enfranchise their boroughs in imitation of the royal example. The statute of Quo Warranto in 1290 led to the confirmation of these charters by the crown, and the doctrine was soon established that none but the king had authority to erect a commune. The Scottish boroughs obtained complete self-government at an earlier date, King David I. (1124-1153) having been anxious to attract commerce, and the walled towns having soon been filled with &ldquo;a crowd of willing settlers from southern Britain and Flanders.&rdquo; Edinburgh, Stirling, Roxburgh, and Berwick formed an important commercial league, &ldquo;to which the other burghs conformed as they came into existence&rdquo; (Robertson, Early Kings, i. 298). Both in England and Scotland the boroughs, whether founded by the crown or by private lords, were important elements in the state, and in England both classes were summoned to parliament indifferently; in 1298 a writ was issued for Northallerton, which belonged to the bishop of Durham, though by a curious anomaly his city of Durham only acquired the franchise by an Act passed in 1673. The introduction of the metaphysical idea of a corporation may be ascribed to the influence of Bracton, who wrote under Henry III. (De Legibus, 57; Fleta, vi. 13). We find Edward I. in 1284 granting franchises to the burgesses and community of Nottingham and their &ldquo;successors,&rdquo; the old form being &ldquo;to the burgesses and their heirs.&rdquo; The practice varied according as the feudal or the ecclesiastical way of regarding such grants prevailed, until in 1440 the town of Kingston-upon-Hull was incorporated as a body politic according to the modern form. The government of the boroughs soon fell to close governing bodies, constituted by restraining ordinances, and the Stuarts made incessant attempts to obtain the nomination even of these smaller bodies. After the fall of the corporation of London in 1681 the provincial boroughs lost or surrendered their privileges; and, though the charters were revived at the Revolution, the narrow and corrupt system remained. The commissioners of 1835 reported a general and just dissatisfaction with the state of the municipal institutions, great distrust of the self-elected councils, and discontent under the burden of local taxation for purposes which were regarded with suspicion. The reform in England followed swiftly on the famous report, and by Acts passed soon afterwards the Scotch and Irish boroughs,

which had long been subject to the same evils, were reconstructed under similar schemes.

The privileges of the cities in the United States illustrate the proposition that the history of every country must determine the type of its municipalities. In almost all parts of Europe the civic franchises arose out of some treaty or contract between the lord and his dependents; in France, however, the character of the corporations was gradually modified as the communal system was extended to the rural districts. In the United States the French model has been followed with the addition of many improvements; and where self-government has been impartially granted to the county, the township, and the village the purely municipal organization has lost its special significance. It is regarded in the American courts as a revocable agency established by the State (without contract or consideration for the grant) for the purpose of carrying out the necessary details of civil government among the inhabitants of an urban district. It is considered to have no vested right to any of its powers or franchises, which are only allowed to exist in furtherance of the design for which the municipality was constituted, that object being the exercise in subordination to the legislature of certain minor powers of government over part of the territory of the State (see Philadelphia v. Fox, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Rep., vol. xiv.). Each city has the general powers of a corporation and no others, in the absence of special laws. It has executive functions and powers of legislation for civic purposes, which are vested in the mayor and his subordinate officers, but it is not in any other way entrusted with judicial authority (see The Political Code of New York, titles 4, 5, ss. 947-8).