At Petty Sessions. nected with these various departments of the civil life of the county. Then, as now, the county magistrates were appointed for life by the Lord Chan cellor; and, in respect to the civil affairs of the county, they had no constituents to whom they were directly responsible, or to whom they had to go for reelection. In those days, county ratepayers had no con trol over county affairs. All that they had to do was to pay the county rate, levied by the magistrates to meet the expenses of admin istering the several departments of county government, In this respect, people who lived in rural England were then at a politi cal disadvantage as compared with those who lived in the cities or boroughs; for, from 1835, all householders in cities and boroughs had votes at municipal elections, and were eligible for election. In 1888, county government was taken completely out of the hands of the county magistrates, and put on as democratic a basis as in the cities, and there were then left to the magis trates only their functions in connection with the administration of justice and the licens ing laws. It is to discharge these duties that county magistrates meet in petty ses sions. While in recent years county magistrates have thus lost their hold on county govern ment, as a body they are still as exclusive as in the days when they were supreme in county affairs, and were in possession of all the off1cial patronage of the county. They are still appointed by the Lord Chancellor, and hold office for life; and now, as when their duties were both civil and judicial, no man can be of the county magistracy unless he is of the landed classes. The old freeholder qualification is no longer necessary to a vote at a Parlia mentary election in a county division. Can didates for Parliament for two generations past have needed neither a landed nor a moneyed qualification to make them eligible for election; but, as regards the county
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magistracy, the eighteenth century landed qualification still survives, and the county magistracy is now almost the only office for which a man must hold land to make him eligible. A magistrate need not be a large land owner; but he must possess an income, de rived from land, of at least £100 a year, or live in a house assessed for taxation at £100 Laws of long-standing settle this; and long social usage has set up the negative qualifi cation that a man who has been engaged in retail trade must not be appointed to the county bench. This is a relic of the days of small things in retail trade, of the days when even the most prosperous tradesmen lived over their stores. The conditions of Eng lish trade and commerce, even of retail trade, have enormously changed during the last thirty years, but the old usage, excluding men who have been in retail trade, still sur vives in connection with the county bench. A brewer, who is the owner of perhaps a hundred squalid becrshops at which his agents retail beer in penny pots, can be of the county bench; but the old usage as to retail tradesmen would be still sufficient to exclude from the county bench the owner of a great dry-goods store who had made an ample fortune and had possessed himself of a landed estate in the country. It is in this one respect that the county bench is now different from the borough bench. The Lord Chancellor appoints to both; but in the case of the borough benches, the Lord-Lieutenant, the Queen's representative in the county, does not stand between the Lord Chancellor and the men to be appointed. In the county he does, and it is in connection with the Lord-Lieu tenant's recommendation or veto, that the social usage, blackballing men who have been engaged in retail trade, comes into play. There is no such usage in connection with the borough benches; and it often happens that the mayor of a large city who presides over the borough magistrates, returns to his
