'In close fights a champion grim,
In camps a leader sage.'
Scott.
'We have had,' says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th September 1839, 'a meeting about our newspaper. Miller, I may say, is engaged, and will be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks. His salary is to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the paper. I think this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum in a year or two—Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and he will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for £25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and already £600 of the £1000 has been subscribed.' His household he left behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick Square. Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear should have been caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena was at once recognised by the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh press had long been held by the Moderate party, and the belief had been that the conflict was a mere clerical striving for power. It remained for Miller to educate the party, and to such effect was this done that, while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in 1839 from Edinburgh had borne but five thousand signatures, the number, says Robert Chambers, mounted in the first year of The Witness to thirteen thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new Richmond in the field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the clerical mind, which after Malebranche is too prone to see everything in itself and its own surroundings, has never fully confessed the services to the country of the layman. As Guthrie points out, a silence is maintained all through Buchanan's Ten Years' Conflict on Miller. This he regrets, not only on the ground that it would be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, but also for its missing the cardinal principle that at such a time the press and public meetings form the most influential of factors. This such a kindred spirit and public orator as Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go beyond the facts of the case, or the judgment now of the country, in maintaining that 'Miller did more than any dozen ecclesiastical leaders, and that, Chalmers excepted, he was the greatest of all the men of the Ten Years' Conflict.'
He certainly was no half advocate or mere 'able editor' in the Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish, and Cunningham were the leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the jurist, Miller was the pen-man of the party. 'His business,' says Guthrie, the orator of the movement, 'was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On the eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a high and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to discuss questions with him, under the impression, perhaps, that he had said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical phrase, "Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet—ready for use, if it is needed"!'
And that it was needed, in his own and the Church's interest, the pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which would form a small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the more from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor Masson, in an appreciation of him in Macmillan's Magazine for 1865, describes as the Goethean 'demonic element.' He had a better knowledge, he shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than was possessed by his clerical colleagues, and along with this went what he calls 'a tremendous element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian than the Celt, leaving his enemy not only slain but battered, bruised and beaten out of shape.' This, though in a sense exaggerated, is true to the extent that he entered the lists not as a mere servant, but as a convinced defender of the liberties of the people. To touch on anything that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of the country—be it by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other site-refusing landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly to court a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly battered condition. Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature of the man. His surviving daughter informs the writer he was 'a very mild and gentle father, and his whole attitude was one depressed with humility.' It was, however, well for site-refusers and factors riding on the top of their commission from absentee landlords to feel that attacks upon their policy in The Witness were not to be lightened by any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. 'The watchman,' he writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, 'is crying half-past twelve o'clock, and I have more than half a mile to walk out of town between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine opportunity for cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a five-shilling stick, strong enough to break heads of the ordinary thickness, and like quite as well to appeal to an antagonist's fears as to his mercy.'
The Witness started with a circulation of six hundred. Its position among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater proof of the personality of the editor and the quality of 'the leaders' remains than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the great mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, but Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people seized on the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from themselves, and his christian name was as familiar as his surname. Yet, curiously enough, from first to last he never believed in the profession of an editor, and from the 'new-journalism' of the paragraph and the leaderette he would have turned in disdain. Nothing but the fact that he felt convinced of his mission would have induced him to leave Cromarty for the post. 'I have been,' he could truly say, 'an honest journalist. I have never once given expression to an opinion which I did not conscientiously regard as sound, nor stated a fact which, at the time at least, I did not believe to be true.' He never mastered, or felt it necessary to master, the routine details of the business, for the paper was read not for its Parliamentary reports, or the exposition of party politics, but for the essays, sketches, or leaders which were known to be by him. Accordingly the mere fluent production of 'copy,' and the diurnal serving up of the editorial thunder by which the members of the fourth estate fondly delude themselves that they lead public opinion, never really came naturally to him. He prepared himself carefully for his work; and perhaps the bi-weekly issue of the paper and its peculiar nature lessened the strain upon the editor. His successor in the editorial chair of the paper, Dr. Peter Bayne, in the preface to Miller's Essays (1862) says:
'He meditated his articles as an author meditates his books or a poet his verses, conceiving them as wholes, working fully out their trains of thought, enriching them with far brought treasures of fact, and adorning them with finished and apposite illustration. In the quality of completeness those articles stand, so far as I know, alone in the records of journalism. For rough and hurrying vigour they might be matched, or more, from the columns of the Times; in lightness of wit and smart lucidity of statement they might be surpassed by the happiest performances of French journalists—a Prévost-Paradol, or a St. Marc Girardin; and for occasional brilliancies of imagination, and sudden gleams of piercing thought neither they nor any other newspaper articles, have, I think, been comparable with those of S. T. Coleridge. But as complete journalistic essays, symmetrical in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and splendid ability, the articles of Hugh Miller are unrivalled.'
Certainly few modern editors could produce such a leader as he did on Dugald Stewart (Aug. 26, 1854), or upon the Encyclopœdia Britannica (April 30, 1842), or could, finding themselves for a day in London, 'when time hung heavy on my hands,' buy a cheap reprint of Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew and convert its hurried perusal into a capital paper on the conflict between Continental Ultramontanism and Liberalism. The individuality of the writer and the tenacity with which he held to his opinions gave the journal a tone naturally impossible to an ordinary party paper. The great mass of the readers of The Witness were of course Liberals, yet he strenuously contended against making it an organ of any political party. Part of the prospectus ran—'The Witness will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and divide the country. Public measures, however, will be weighed as they present themselves, in an impartial spirit, and with care proportioned to their importance.' He had noticed, he said, the Church of Scotland for a time converted by Conservatism into a mine against the Whigs, and he was determined that no 'tool-making politician' should again convert it to a party weapon. It was to remain the organ of 'the Free Church people against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist.' So careful was he of the good name of the paper that he 'often retained communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real value.' Chalmers read the paper to the last with approval, and this was a source of joy and support to Miller. Nothing but such a wise supervision could have piloted The Witness through the abuse and the inventions of the Tory organs. When the Edinburgh Advertiser, of June 13, 1848, could try to improve on that rhetorical flight of Barrère, characteristically fathered by its author on 'an ancient author,' about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants, by an assertion that The Witness had 'menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in buttonholes on the streets of Paris!'—proof was naturally wanting. A phantom of a 'grey discrowned head sounding hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall' was also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the house of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe professed to detect a subtle attack on the House of Hanover in the interests of the Free Church. 'I am a Whig, in politics,' he said, 'never a Radical or Conservative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the working men, for them he had seen on their worst side. 'Three-fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who like Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected the opportunity of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' He was no believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, and as an admirer of Delolme's views on our constitution, the radical he regarded as a 'political quack,' convinced as he was that 'those who think must govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with Guthrie, a system of undenominational education of a kind pretty much what is now established, a moderate extension of the franchise, abolition of entail, and the game laws. The Maynooth grant and Macaulay he opposed. He was an Oliverian for Ireland, and the cause of much trouble in the most distressful country he viewed as associated with that subsidy, which he would have preferred to see converted into a grant for science.
Indeed, like most of his countrymen he had a strong view of historical, as distinguished from mere party, conservatism. The last has of course been rendered simply impossible in Scotland by the history and the ecclesiastical tenets of the country, but he ever carried about him something like the conviction of Dr. Livingstone, that the common people of Scotland had read history and were no levellers. Thus he held, like Burke, to what Mr. Morley calls 'the same energetic feeling about moral laws, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge.' This historic conservatism of Burke would be taken by most Scotchmen as a pretty good basis for reasoned Liberalism, and the fixity of Miller's main positions only exposed him the more to the wearisome Tory vocabulary of 'high-flyer, fire-raiser, fanatic,' etc. Admirably in the Letter to Brougham does he seize on the ground of the political Liberalism of Scotland:—