Municipal Corporations, Companies, Guilds, and Fraternities.

The boroughs, the church, and corporations, have long formed the feet of clay, on which the Tory Oligarchy has been borne up. It has had other supports in judicial abuses and commercial monopolies, but these have been the main pillars of its strength. Now, however, that Gatton and Old Sarum are on the eve of being divested of their mysterious influence, it is not improbable that the kindred nuisance of municipal bodies, of town-councils, guilds, fraternities, and brotherhoods will be abated, either by intire abolition, or thorough reform in their institutions. They have had their day and their use: at present they are only shadows of former power—historical landmarks which, like the remains of a Roman encampment or baronial residence, serve to indicate an age, that with its customs, manners, and establishments is fast descending into “the tomb of the Capulets.”

The public mind, however, is not likely to be a precipitate innovator either on corporate or other institutions consecrated by “hoar antiquity.” In addition to the strength they derive from early associations, they are fortified by the difficulty of concentrating general attention on a specific object. More than half a century was consumed in discussion and exposition to prepare the people for the removal of the disabilities of the Catholics, and upwards of two centuries in rousing such an united expression of feeling as is essential to the attainment of Parliamentary Reform. The stream of popular opinion is of immense volume, requiring energetic and long-continued efforts, to direct it into new and more fertilizing channels.

Decayed boroughs and corporations, where they are not identical, may be justly deemed of twin origin, and resemble each other in their chief characteristics. Formerly the commonalty of bodies corporate, in the same manner as the parliamentary electors of a borough, included the whole of the free inhabitants, who represented the property, intelligence, and population within their jurisdictions. But this municipal concentration of wealth and power has ceased to subsist; corporations no longer embody the opulence, numbers, or respectability of the cities and towns in which they are placed; they have degenerated into mere juntos, having no more community with the people than the voters of Malmsbury or Calne with the general mass of the inhabitants. Such is the state of the corporations of London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Bristol, Bath, Liverpool, and Leeds; they consist of little knots of persons, not uniformly of the first class either for wealth or intelligence, who have succeeded to their corporate immunities by right of paternity, conviviality, congeniality of politics or religion, or some other claim very different from that of popular suffrage. So constituted, they form petty oligarchies in the midst of their respective communities, with which they wage a constant war of oppression and annoyance, and to whose welfare they are often as much opposed as the great parent oligarchy of the Boroughmongers has long been to that of the nation.

The late elections offer a striking example of the hostile interests which separate corporations from their fellow citizens. In all the places mentioned above, the municipal bodies made the most strenuous efforts to return anti-reform candidates. It was the same at Oxford and Cambridge, the clerical corporations of the Universities not yielding to their lay-brethren in the expression of aversion to “the Bill.”

Now, whence does this arise? How does it happen that the privileges of the chartered bodies are always felt to be at variance with the general weal, and that corporators and boroughmongers are always found in close alliance? A common danger ordinarily unites men in a common defence, and this, we apprehend, is the cause of the coalition. Both parties are sensible of their social insignificance; both are conscious of having long monopolized the rights of others; and both feel that reform would be destructive of their exclusive interests and pretensions. Hence their confederacies on all occasions. Abuse must ever depend upon abuse for support. The compact is a diabolical one,—it is the same which sometimes bands together the outcasts of society,—a general consciousness of turpitude, with a consciousness of the necessity of fraternizing for common safety.

It is not merely as the uniform opponents of civil and religious liberty, nor as the petty local oppressors and prosecutors within their precincts, nor as the vexatious enemies of the freedom of industry, that corporations are to be charged as arch-delinquents to society. They are justly obnoxious to imputations of a darker complexion. It is well known that corporate bodies are the principal trustees of charity estates all over the kingdom; they are, also, the trustees of town and church-lands, of loan-monies and of immense funds bequeathed for the purposes of education, and for the clothing and maintenance of the orphan, the aged, and infirm. It is in these capacities their chief malversations consist, in the jobbing, peculation, and wasteful administration of the vast funds entrusted to them for pious and charitable uses. But before adverting to this part of the subject and to the general abuses of corporate establishments, it will be convenient to premise a few observations on the origin of municipal institutions, and also of those subordinate associations denominated guilds and fraternities.