NEGLECTED SCOTLAND.
A sensible Scotchman writing from Haddington to the Times, says that "the real grievances of Scotland are not her insulted Lions, nor her deserted Holyrood," but lie in "her ill-paved, worse-lighted and undrained market-towns, and in the incurable apathy of the inhabitants to sanitary reform."
This gentleman says that, on Tuesday last, at a meeting of the inhabitants of Haddington, it was proposed to adopt the drainage clauses of the New Police Act. After an earnest and solemn appeal from their parish minister imploring them "to unite with heart and hand in bringing the influences of pure air and water to bear on the wretched homes of their poorer brethren," followed by an awful warning from a medical officer of the town, "the householders (many of them wealthy men)" rejected, by a majority of ten to one, a bill for their assessment, in order to have their streets and houses cleansed, at the rate of 10d. in the pound.
A week previously, the Scotchman states, the Haddingtonians had devoted a day to fasting and humiliation in the hope that the pestilence might be averted from them.
Fasting involves self-denial. The Haddington fasters cannot deny themselves to the amount of 10d. in the pound. They cannot fling that tenpence into the gutter, to sweep it, although the gutter is poisoning their poor neighbours, and may poison themselves too.
Christians are supposed to wash their faces when they fast. Whether the Haddington housekeepers accompany their fasting with any ablution may be doubted, since they refuse to pay 10d. in the pound for washing their town. By preference, for cheapness sake, they would rather perhaps fast in sackcloth and ashes; but as all sackcloth is now used up in sacks, whilst ashes are carted away for manure, their fasting possibly consists in wearing their usual clothes, and sitting still in their usual filth, and doing nothing. Whether they abstain from anything else—from haggis or sheep's head, or collops, or whiskey-toddy—in addition to abstinence from wholesome exertion—we do not know.
As to the Scotch Lion playing second fiddle in the Royal Arms, he may bless the sometime Duke of Argyle and his stars, and be contented to have any place there to fiddle in at all. By all heraldic right he ought to be ousted altogether, and his place should be occupied by the more appropriate emblem of a Pig; a whining, grunting, odoriferous Hog Rampant, sprawling in the filth of towns.