arty be aiming at centralised government
which has reformed the municipal corporations? We will see. The reform
of the municipal corporations of England is a covert attack on the
authority of the English gentry,-that great body which perhaps forms the
most substantial existing obstacle to the perpetuation of Whiggism in
power. By this democratic Act the county magistrate is driven from the
towns where he before exercised a just influence, while an elective
magistrate from the towns jostles him on the bench at quarter sessions,
and presents in his peculiar position an anomaly in the constitution of
the bench, flattering to the passions, however fatal to the interests,
of the giddy million. Here is a lever to raise the question of county
reform whenever an obstinate shire may venture to elect a representative
in Parliament hostile to the liberal oligarchs. Let us admit, for the
moment, that the Whigs ultimately succeed in subverting the ancient and
hereditary power of the English gentry. Will the municipal corporations
substitute themselves as an equivalent check on a centralising
Government? Whence springs their influence? From property? Not half a
dozen have estates. Their influence springs from the factitious power
with which the reforming Government has invested them, and of which the
same Government will deprive them in a session, the moment they cease
to be corresponding committees of the reforming majority in the House of
Commons. They will either be swept away altogether, or their functions
will be limited to raising the local taxes which will discharge their
expenses of the detachment of the metropolitan police, or the local
judge or governor, whom Downing Street may send down to preside over
their constituents. With one or two exceptions, the English corporations
do not possess more substantial and durable elements of power than
the municipalities of France. What check are they on Paris? These
corporations have neither prescription in their favour, nor property.
Their influence is maintained neither by tradition nor substance. They
have no indirect authority over the minds of their townsmen; they have
only their modish charters to appeal to, and the newly engrossed letter
of the law. They have no great endowments of whose public benefits they
are the official distributers; they do not stand on the vantage-ground
on which we recognise the trustees of the public interests; they neither
administer to the soul nor the