ly must be
mentioned C. Gross, Bibliography of British
Municipal History (New York, 1897), an invaluable
guide to the voluminous literature of an intricate
subject.]

*201. The Government of London.*--The unique governmental (p. 190)
arrangements of London are the product in part of historical survival
and in part of special and comparatively recent legislation.
Technically, the "city" of London is still what it has been through
centuries, i.e., an area with a government of its own comprising but
a single square mile on the left bank of the Thames. By a series of
measures covering a period of somewhat more than fifty years, however,
the entire region occupied by the densely populated metropolis has
been drawn into a closely co-ordinated scheme of local administration.
London was untouched by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 and the
changes by which the governmental system of the present day was
brought into being began to be introduced only with the adoption of
the Metropolis Management Act of 1855. The government of the city was
left unchanged, but the surrounding parishes, hitherto governed
independently by their vestries, were at this time brought for certain
purposes under the control of a central authority known as the
Metropolitan Board of Works. The Local Government Act of 1888 carried
the task of organization a stage further. The Board of Works was
abolished, extra-city London was transformed into an administrative
county of some 120 square miles, and upon the newly created London (p. 191)
County Council (elected by the rate-payers) was conferred a varied and
highly important group of powers. Finally, in 1899 the London
Government Act simplified the situation by sweeping away a mass of
surviving authorities and jurisdictions and by creating twenty-eight
metropolitan boroughs, each with mayor, aldermen, and councillors such
as any provincial borough possesses, though with powers specially
defined and, on the side of finance, somewhat restricted. Within each
borough are urban parishes, each with its own vestry.

At the center of the metropolitan area stands still the historic City,
with its lord mayor, its life aldermen, and its annually elected
councillors, organized after a fashion which has hardly changed in
four and a half centuries. Within the administrative county the county
council acts as a central authority, the b