It is a grand, though doubtless natural, mistake to hold that the members of the Town Councils of our Scottish cities and burghs really represent in opinion and feeling their nominal constituencies the electors, through whose suffrages they have been placed in office. In very many cases they do not represent them at all: they form an entirely dissimilar class,––a class as thoroughly different from the solid mass of the community, on which they float like froth and spume on the surface of the great deep, as that other class from which, because there are unhappily scarce any other men in the field, we have to select our legislators. The subject is one of importance. In the Sabbath controversy now carrying on, it has been invariably taken for granted by the anti-Sabbatarian press of the country, that our Town Councils do represent the general constituency; and there has been much founded on the assumption. We shall by and by be finding the same assumption employed against us in the Popery endowment question; and it would be well, therefore, carefully to examine the grounds on which it rests, and to ascertain whether there may not exist some practical mode of testing its unsolidity.

It is not difficult to see how that upper class to which our legislators of both Houses of Parliament mainly belong, should differ greatly from the larger and more solid portion of the middle classes in almost all questions of a religious character and bearing. Bacon, in his Essay on Kings, has quaintly, but, we are afraid, all too justly remarked, that 379 ‘of all kind of men, God is the least beholding unto them [kings]; for He doth most for them, and they do ordinarily least for Him.’ But the character applies to more than kings. It affects the whole upper layers of the great pyramid of society, from its gilded pinnacle down to the higher confines of its solid middle portion; and to these upper layers of the erection our legislators, hereditary and elective, with, of course, a very few exceptions in the Lower House, all belong. They are drafted from the classes with which, if we perhaps except the lowest and most degraded of all, religious questions weigh least. There is, of course, no class wholly divorced from good; and those exceptions to which Cowper could refer two generations ago obtain still:

But in at least the mass, religion has not been influential among the governing classes in Britain since the days of the Commonwealth. It has formed one of the great forces on which they have calculated––a formidable power among the people, that they have striven, according to the nature of the emergency, to quiet or awaken, bias or control,––now for the ends of party, when an antagonist faction had to be overborne and put down,––now for the general benefit of the country, when a foreign enemy had to be repelled or an intestine discord to be suppressed; but it has been peculiarly a force outside the governing classes––external, not internal, to them,––a power which it has been their special work to regulate and direct, not a power which has regulated and directed them. The last British Government which––God, according to Bacon, having done much for it––laboured earnestly to do much for God, was that very remarkable one which centred in the person of the Lord Protector. 380

Hence naturally much that is unsatisfactory to the comparatively religious middle classes of the country, in the conduct, with regard to religious questions, of the classes on whom devolves the work of legislation. There is no real community of feeling and belief in these matters between the two. To the extent to which religion is involved in the legislative enactments of the time, the middle class is in reality not represented, and the upper class does not represent. It may not seem equally obvious, however, how there should be a lack of representation, not only among our members of Parliament, but also among our members of Council. They at least surely belong, it may be said, to the middle classes, by whom and from among whom they are chosen for their office. Certainly in some cases they do; in many others, however, they form a class scarce less peculiar than those upper classes out of which the legislators of the country come to be drawn, simply because there is no other class in the field out of which they can be selected.

The Reform and Municipality Bills wrought a mighty change in the Town Councils of the kingdom. The old close burgh system, with all its abuses, ceased for ever, save in its remains––monumental debts, and everlasting leases of town lands, granted on easy terms to officials and their friends; and droll recollections, like those embalmed by Galt in our literature, of solid municipal feasting, and not so solid municipal services,––of exclusive cliqueships, misemployed patronages, modest self-elections,––in short, of a general practice of jobbing, more palpable than pleasant, and that tended rather to individual advantage than corporate honour. The old men retired, and a set of new men were elevated by newly-created constituencies into their vacated places, to be disinterested on dilapidated means, and noisy on short commons. The days of long and heavy feasts had come to a close, and the days of long and heavy speeches succeeded. No two events 381 which this world of ours ever saw, led to so vast an amount of bad speaking as the one Reform Bill that swept away the rotten burghs, and the other Reform Bill that opened the close ones. By and by, however, it came to be seen that the old, privileged, self-elected class were succeeded in many instances by a class that, though elected by their neighbours, were yet not quite like their neighbours. Their neighbours were men who, with their own personal business to attend to, had neither the time nor the ambition to be moving motions or speaking speeches in the eye of the public, and who could not take the trouble to secure elections by canvassing voters. The men who had the time, and took the trouble, were generally a class ill-hafted in society, who had high notions of reforming everything save themselves, and of keeping right all kinds of businesses except their own. The old state of things was, notwithstanding its many faults, a state under which our Scotch burghers rose into consideration by arts of comparative solidity. A tradesman or shopkeeper looked well to his business,––became an important man in the market-place and a good man in the bank,––increased in weight in the same proportion that his coffers did so, and grew influential and oracular on the strength of his pounds sterling per annum. With altered times, however, there arose a new order of men,––

‘The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame.’

It was no longer necessary to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring money and character: a glib tongue, a few high professions of public principle, and a few weeks’ canvassing, were found to serve the turn more than equally well.

There commenced straightway a new dynasty of dignities and honours. Councillors got into print in the capacity of speechmakers, who, save for the revolution effected, would 382 never have got into print in any other capacity than, mayhap, that of bankrupts in the Gazette. Eloquent men walked to church in scarlet, greatly distinguished as provosts and bailies, who but for the happy change would have crept unseen all their lives long among the crowd. Members of Parliament went arm-in-arm, when they visited their constituencies, with folk altogether unused to such consideration; and when a burgher’s son sought to be promoted to the excise, or a seaman to the coast-guard service, it was through the new men that influence had to be exerted. And of course the new men had to approve themselves worthy of their honours, by making large sacrifices for the public weal. They had in many cases not much to do: the magistracy of the bygone school, whom they succeeded, had obligingly relieved posterity of the trouble of having a too preponderous amount of municipal property to manage and look after; but if they had not much to do, they had at least a great deal to say; and as they were ambitious of saying it, their own individual concerns were not unfrequently neglected, in order that their constituencies might be edified and informed. In cases not a few, the natural consequences ensued. We have in our eye one special burgh in the north, in which every name in the Town Council, from that of the provost down to that of the humblest councillor, had, in the course of some two or three years, appeared also in the Gazette; and the previous provost of the place had got desperately involved with the branch banks of the district, and had ultimately run the country, to avoid a prosecution for forgery.

Let it not be held that we are including the entire tribe of modern town functionaries in one sweeping condemnatory description. We ourselves, in our time (we refer to the fact with a high but surely natural pride), held office as a town councillor, under the modern rÉgime, for the space of three whole years in a parliamentary burgh that contained 383 no fewer than forty voters. All may learn from history how it was that Bailie Weezle earned his municipal honours during the ancient state of things in the famous burgh of Gudetown. ‘Bailie Weezle,’ says Galt, ‘was a man not overladen with worldly wisdom, and had been chosen into the Council principally on account of being easily managed. Being an idle person living on his money, and of a soft and quiet nature, he was, for the reason aforesaid, taken by one consent among us, where he always voted on the provost’s side; for in controverted questions every one is beholden to take a part, and the bailie thought it was his duty to side with the chief magistrate.’ Our own special qualifications for office were, we must be permitted in justice to ourselves to state, different from Bailie Weezle’s by a shade.

It was generally held, that if there was nothing to do we would do nothing, and if nothing to say we would say nothing; and so thoroughly did we fulfil every expectation that had been previously formed of us, that for three years together we said and did nothing in our official capacity with great Éclat, and regularly absented ourselves from every meeting of Council except the first, to the entire satisfaction of our constituency. It will not be held, therefore, in the face of so important a fact, that we include in our description all the town magistracies under the existing state of things, and most certainly not all modern town councillors.

Nothing, however, can be more certain, we repeat, than that they differ from their constituencies as a class, and that they are chosen to represent them in municipal affairs, just as another and higher class is chosen to represent them in the Legislature––merely because there is no other class in the field. The solid middle-class men of business have, as has been said, something else to employ them, and cannot spare their services. They cannot accept of mere notoriety, with mayhap a modicum of patronate influence attached, as an adequate price for the time and labour which their own 384 affairs demand. It is a peculiar class in the municipal as in the literary field, that ‘weigh solid pudding against empty praise,’ and come to regard the empty praise as solid enough to outweigh the pudding. Not but that it is a fine thing to be in a Town Council, and to see one’s fortnightly speeches flourishing in the public prints. Where else could some of our Edinburgh worthies bring themselves so prominently before the eyes of the country?

Where else, for instance, could Councillor ––– impart such universal interest to the fact that he taught in a Sabbath school, and rode out of town every evening to attend to its duties by a Sunday train,––thus forming an invariable item, it would seem, in the average of the ninety-two Sabbath journeyers that travelled by the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, and failed to remunerate the proprietors? Or where else could Councillor ––– refer with such prodigious effect to Dr. Chalmers’s bloody-minded scheme of ‘executing the heathen?’ Or where else could Councillor ––– succeed in eliciting so general a belief that he was one of the poor endangered heathens over which the threatened execution hung, through his famous oath ‘By Jupiter?’

By the way, is this latter gentleman acquainted with Smollett’s story of the eccentric Mr. H., and chivalrously bent, on the same principle, in acknowledging a deity in distress? ‘Mr. H., some years ago, being in the Campidoglio at Rome,’ says Smollett, ‘made up to the bust of Jupiter, and bowing very low, exclaimed, in the Italian language, “I hope, sir, if ever you get your head above water again, you will remember that I paid my respects to you in your adversity.” This sally,’ continues the historian, ‘was reported to the Cardinal Camerlengo, and by him laid before the Pope Benedict XIV., who could not help laughing at the extravagance of the address, and said to the Cardinal, “Those English heretics think they have a right to go to the devil in their own way.’” 385

Now, standing, as we do, either on the threshold of serious national controversies of a religious bearing, or already entered upon them, it would be well to mark and test the facts which it is our present object specially to point out. It would be well to take measures for rendering it an as palpable as it is a solid truth, that the municipal tail of the country’s representation no more really represents it in several very important respects than its parliamentary head. It represents it most inadequately on the Sabbath question now; it will represent it quite as inadequately in the Popish endowment question by and by; and if in reality we do not wish to see the battle going against us on both issues, there must be effective means employed to demonstrate the fact. In matters of a religious bearing, the ill-hafted notoriety-men of our Town Councils much more nearly resemble the upper indifferent classes, from which our legislators are drafted, than they do the solid bulk of the community.

They are decidedly in the movement party, and form a portion, not of the ballast, but of the superfluous sail, of the State. Nor should it be difficult to render the fact evident to all. In one of our northern burghs––Dingwall––a majority of the Town Council lately memorialized the Directors of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in exactly the same vein as the majority of our Edinburgh Town Council. So extreme a step seemed rather extraordinary for Ross-shire; and a gentleman of the burgh, one of the voters, convinced that the officials were far indeed from representing their constituency, shrewdly set himself to demonstrate the real state of the case. First he possessed himself of an accredited list of the voters; and then, with a memorial addressed to the Directors, strongly condemnatory of the conduct of the Council, he called upon every voter in the burgh who had not taken the opposite side in the character of a councillor, with the exception of two, 386 whose views he had previously ascertained to be unfavourable. And what, thinks our reader, was the result? Seven councillors had voted on the anti-Sabbatarian side; and the provost, for himself and the Council, had afterwards signed the memorial. And of the voters outside, four were found to make common cause with them. Two more did not make common cause with them, but were not prepared to condemn them, and so did not sign. There were thus fourteen in all who were either not opposed to the running of Sabbath trains, or who were at least not disposed openly to denounce the parties who had memorialized the Directors, in the name of the burgh, to the effect that Sabbath trains should be run. Of the other electors, ten were non-resident, five more were out of town at the time, three had fallen out of possession since the roll had been made up, and one was dead. And all the others, amounting to sixty-nine in number, at once signed the document condemnatory of the Council, and were happy to have an opportunity of doing so. The available votes of the burgh were opposed to those of their pseudo-representatives in the proportion of nearly six to one.

In the parliamentary burgh of Cromarty an almost similar experiment was made. There, however, though the movement party had composed the majority of the Council only a few years since, they had been cast out of office, partly through a strong reaction which had taken place against them, partly in consequence of a quarrel among themselves. And so the existing Town Council took the initiative in memorializing the Directors in favour of the recent resolution not to run Sunday trains. Of all the voters of the burgh, only five stood aloof; all the others made common cause with the Town Council in attaching their names to their document.

But it is a significant fact, that in the knot of five the ex-councillors of the movement party were included; and 387 that had they been in the Council still, a majority would to a certainty have voted in the wake of the Edinburgh Town Council. There is much instruction in facts such as these; and they may be turned to great practical account.

Why should not the sentiments of every voter in Scotland be taken on this same Sabbath question now? or what is there to prevent us from taking the sentiments of every voter in Scotland on the Popish endowment question by and by?

It is a tedious and expensive matter to get up petitions, to which all and sundry affix their names; but the franchise-holders of Scotland are comparatively a not very numerous class; and about the same amount of labour that goes to a monthly collection for the Sustentation Fund, would be quite sufficient to place before Government and the country the full expression of their feelings and opinions on the two leading questions of the day. But enough for the present––‘a word to the wise.’

January 20, 1847.