[Sidenote:  Distinctions between towns and cities.] There is more or less of history involved in these offices and designations, to which we may devote a few words of explanation.  In New England local usage there is an ambiguity in the word “town.”  As an official designation it means the inhabitants of a township considered as a community or corporate body.  In common parlance it often means the patch of land constituting the township on the map, as when we say that Squire Brown’s elm is “the biggest tree in town.”  But it still oftener means a collection of streets, houses, and families too large to be called a village, but without the municipal government that characterizes a city.  Sometimes it is used par excellence for a city, as when an inhabitant of Cambridge, itself a large suburban city, speaks of going to Boston as going “into town.”  But such cases are of course mere survivals from the time when the suburb was a village.  In American usage generally the town is something between village and city, a kind of inferior or incomplete city.  The image which it calls up in the mind is of something urban and not rural.  This agrees substantially with the usage in European history, where “town” ordinarily means a walled town or city as contrasted with a village.  In England the word is used either in this general sense, or more specifically as signifying an inferior city, as in America.  But the thing which the town lacks, as compared with the complete city, is very different in America from what it is in England.  In America it is municipal government—­with mayor, aldermen, and common council—­which must be added to the town in order to make it a city.  In England the town may (and usually does) have this municipal government; but it is not distinguished by the Latin name “city” unless it has a cathedral and a bishop.  Or in other words the English city is, or has been, the capital of a diocese.  Other towns in England are distinguished as “boroughs,” an old Teutonic word which was originally applied to towns as fortified places.[3] The voting inhabitants of an English city are called “citizens;” those of a borough are called “burgesses.”  Thus the official corporate designation of Cambridge is “the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses of Cambridge;” but Oxford is the seat of a bishopric, and its corporate designation is “the mayor, aldermen, and citizens of Oxford.”

[Footnote 3:  The word appears in many town names, such as Edinburgh, Scarborough, Canterbury, Bury St. Edmunds; and on the Continent, as Hamburg, Cherbourg, Burgos, etc.  In Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, the name “borough” is applied to a certain class of municipalities with some of the powers of cities.]

QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT.

1.  What is the essential difference between township government and county government?

2.  What is the distinct advantage of the former?