3.  Why is direct government impossible in the county?

4.  Speak of the degree of efficiency in county government.

5.  Why is direct government impossible in a city?

6.  What difficulties in direct government were experienced in Boston in 1820 and many years preceding?

7.  What remedy for these difficulties was adopted?

8.  Show how the word “town” is used to indicate

  a.  The land of a township.
  b.  A somewhat large collection of streets, houses, and families.
  c.  And even, in some instances, a city.

9.  What is the town commonly understood to be in American usage?

10.  What is the difference in the United States between a town and a city?

11.  What is the difference in England between a town and a city?

12.  Distinguish between citizens and burgesses in England.

Section 2. Origin of English Boroughs and Cities.

[Sidenote:  “Chesters.”] [Sidenote:  Coalescence of towns to fortified boroughs.] What, then, was the origin of the English borough or city?  In the days when Roman legions occupied for a long time certain military stations in Britain, their camps were apt to become centres of trade and thus to grow into cities.  Such places were generally known as casters or chesters, from the Latin castra, “camp,” and there are many of them on the map of England to-day.  But these were exceptional cases.  As a rule the origin of the borough was as purely English as its name.  We have seen that the town was originally the dwelling-place of a stationary clan, surrounded by palisades or by a dense quickset hedge.  Now where such small enclosed places were thinly scattered about they developed simply into villages.  But where, through the development of trade or any other cause, a good many of them grew up close together within a narrow compass, they gradually coalesced into a kind of compound town; and with the greater population and greater wealth, there was naturally more elaborate and permanent fortification than that of the palisaded village.  There were massive walls and frowning turrets, and the place came to be called a fortress or “borough.”  The borough, then, was simply several townships packed tightly together; a hundred smaller in extent and thicker in population than other hundreds.[4]

[Footnote 4:  Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 466.  For a description of the hundred, see above, pp. 75-80.]

[Sidenote:  The borough as a hundred.] From this compact and composite character of the borough came several important results.  We have seen that the hundred was the smallest area for the administration of justice.  The township was in many respects self-governing, but it did not have its court, any more than the New England township of the present day has its court.  The lowest court was that of the hundred, but as the borough was equivalent to a hundred it soon came to have its own court.  And although much obscurity still surrounds the early history of municipal government in England, it is probable that this court was a representative board, like any other hundred court, and that the relation of the borough to its constituent townships resembled the relation of the modern city to its constituent wards.