To obtain the full privileges of citizenship one had to be enrolled in a guild.  The guild hall became the city hall.  The aldermen, or head men of sundry guilds, became the head men of the several wards.  There was a representative board, or common council, elected by the citizens.  The aldermen and common council held their meetings in the Guildhall, and over these meetings presided the chief magistrate, or port-reeve, who by this time, in accordance with the fashion then prevailing, had assumed the French title of mayor.  As London had come to be a little world in itself, so this city government reproduced on a small scale the national government; the mayor answering to the king, the aristocratic board of aldermen to the House of Lords, and the democratic common council to the House of Commons.  A still more suggestive comparison, perhaps, would be between the aldermen and our federal Senate, since the aldermen represented wards, while the common council represented the citizens.

[Sidenote:  The city of London.] The constitution thus perfected in the city of London[6] six hundred years ago has remained to this day without essential change.  The voters are enrolled members of companies which represent the ancient guilds.  Each year they choose one of the aldermen to be lord mayor.  Within the city he has precedence next to the sovereign and before the royal family; elsewhere he ranks as an earl, thus indicating the equivalence of the city to a county, and with like significance he is lord lieutenant of the city and justice of the peace.  The twenty-six aldermen, one for each ward, are elected by the people, such as are entitled to vote for members of parliament; they are justices of the peace.  The common councilmen, 206 in number, are also elected by the people, and their legislative power within the city is practically supreme; parliament does not think of overruling it.  And the city government thus constituted is one of the most clean-handed and efficient in the world.[7]

[Footnote 6:  The city of London extends east and west from the Tower to Temple Bar, and north and south from Finsbury to the Thames, with a population of not more than 100,000, and is but a small part of the enormous metropolitan area now known as London, which is a circle of twelve miles radius in every direction from its centre at Charing Cross, with a population of more than 5,000,000.  This vast area is an agglomeration of many parishes, manors, etc., and has no municipal government in common.]

[Footnote 7:  Loftie, History of London , vol. i. p. 446] [Sidenote:  English cities, the bulwarks of liberty.]