and
amending legislation. This great statute is supplemented at a number
of points by the Local Government Act of 1888, the District and Parish
Councils Act of 1894, the Education Act of 1902, and other regulative
measures of the past thirty years. At the bottom of the scale among
urban governmental units stands the urban district, which differs from
an ordinary borough principally in that it has no charter and its
council possesses less authority than does that of the borough.[269]
The number of urban districts is in the neighborhood of eight hundred.
Under the terms of the act of 1894 the governing authority in each is
a council consisting of members elected for three years, women being
eligible. There are no aldermen, and no mayor is chosen. The (p. 187)
council elects its own chairman and other officers, and it meets at
least once a month. Its functions, of which the most important is the
control of sanitation and of highways, are discharged largely through
the agency of committees. The district council possesses none of the
police and judicial privileges which the borough councils commonly
enjoy. It is more closely controlled by the Local Government Board,
and, in general, it lacks "the status and ornamental trappings of a
municipal authority.[270]" Yet in practice its powers are hardly less
extensive than are those of the council of a full-fledged borough. New
urban districts may be created in thickly populated localities by
joint action of the county council and the Local Government Board.

[Footnote 269: Speaking strictly, a borough is an
urban district, and something more.]

[Footnote 270: Ashley, Local and Central
Government, 45.]

*197. Boroughs and "Cities."*--The standard type of municipal unit is
the borough. Among boroughs there is a certain amount of variation,
but the differences which exist are those rather of historic
development and of nomenclature than of governmental forms or
functions. There are "municipal" boroughs, "county" boroughs, and
cities. Any non-rural area upon which has been conferred a charter
stipulating rights of local self-government is a borough. Areas of the
sort which have been withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the
administrative counties in which they are situated are county
boroughs; those not so withdrawn are municipal boroughs. The term
"city" was once employed to designate exclusively plac