Leading Articles on Various Subjects

by Hugh Miller

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?’