IN the crowd of good statutes which make the year 1833 memorable, one has escaped the notice of writers. This was a measure for reforming the burghs, or municipal towns, of Scotland.

A measure of this kind had been strenuously demanded in the year 1785, and for seven years afterwards. Mr. Archibald Fletcher, an advocate, was the leader of the Burgh Reformers; he used his pen in the cause when he was too old to speak for it; thirty years of failure did not dishearten him. Lord Archibald Hamilton, in the next generation, spoke to the House of Commons for the change; and, at a time when such efforts were systematically choked, he surprised the world by persuading a majority of his few listeners to appoint a committee; but he got no farther. He died before his friend Lord Althorp and his kinsman Sir James Graham came into office; his severe and proud liberality was fresh in their minds when the reform of Parliament gave them an opportunity of working out his conclusions.

The last Tory Ministry would have handled the matter had their interference been extorted by riots or by an armed association. The Whigs dealt with it, because it had been quite proved that there were grievances and scandals in the thing which were condemned by a multitude of householders competent to judge, and because they owed to these Scottish townsfolk some requital for their forty or fifty years of endurance. Lord Lyndhurst and his disciples might

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have thrown out the Bill, as they threw out another long delayed measure-the Bill for founding cheap and numerous Courts of Justice. It would seem that, in passing the Act which reformed the Scottish town government, they did not observe how they were establishing a precedent for England. Perhaps their acquiescence was due to nothing more or less than a vague sense of Scotland's being one of those objects which a man of fashion could not be expected to notice.

Yet to anyone fond of public affairs it is a relief to turn aside and look at the peculiar affairs of Scotland; and that which is called English history would be less fatiguing if it were rather more British, rather less Irish; if it took cognizance of institutions shaped by argument yet as durable as customs, desired, claimed, and preserved by men who combine without plotting, and remonstrate without threatening.

The councillors of a burgh had been allowed to name councillors when there were vacancies, and even when the whole body had to be renewed, instead of asking the householders to choose. There may have been a time when the councils were well constituted; but, even if the wisest king picked out the very best men in a town, these men would in course of time be corrupted by such a privilege as that of naming their successors, if there were no outside force to check them.

Suppose certain townsmen were in the first instance appointed councillors, because they were the chosen leaders of several trades or handicrafts, yet, if

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the trades and handicrafts were once for all fixed, it would be found in course of time that they ceased to constitute the whole town, and that they had varied one with another in numbers, wealth, and honour, so as to deserve unequal representation in the Common Council. Suppose, for instance, that in the year 1500 there were in Edinburgh twelve such trades as weavers, butchers, vintners, or the like; their equal votes given through their deacons would at first be fair and satisfactory; but by the year 1600 there would have arisen a new set of workmen, such as goldsmiths, opticians, mechanical engineers; and these sets of craftsmen would send no one to the Guild Hall, because they were not guilds in 1500, and no new guild could be made. Suppose, again, that there was a guild of goldsmiths from the first, but that it had become in the year 1700 something more than a set of handicraftsmen, that the goldsmiths had become the fiduciary guardians of gold belonging to farmers and lords, and, through money lending had grown into the new profession of bankers; then it would be anomalous, and perhaps grievous, that so important a business should have no more power in the Common Council than the butchers.

It came to pass, certainly in Edinburgh, seemingly in other towns, that the ablest and the most respected citizens had no footing in the municipal government; they were socially above it, legally below it. Thus the principle of co-ordinate guilds, or the convergence of divers interests, could be upheld only by a vigilant and impartial sovereign,

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taking cognizance of decay and growth, pruning, grafting, and training with constant regard to symmetry.

The representation of orders or 'estates in a realm may sometimes be kept up with a great amount of inequality, because this or that 'estate may affect the imagination, and may by 'prestige make up for some dwindling. It would seem that this principle is less applicable to a civic community than to a realm. There is a Scottish legend of a town council which possessed, in its corporate capacity, one pair of boots. On high and solemn days it could not ride in procession; it was formed in line, so that the two councillors on the flanks should overawe the people, each having one boot and one spur to show. By the end of the eighteenth century the dignity of these oligarchies was nearly worn out; they had been overlapped by the unprivileged merchants, by the professions which had outgrown the guild-formation, by the adepts of arts that were unknown to the founders of the burghs, and by the genteel annuitants, whose wants and tastes were but dimly guessed at by a provost and baillies.

It was not that the poor were wronged by a few rich families; or, if the poor were wronged, it was because the oligarchies neglected them rather than defrauded them. It was rather that the nominal rulers of a town were not sufficiently controlled by the prosperous and the intelligent people. In such matters as police, water-supply, and regulation of docks, there were little secessions and rebellions against the muni

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cipality, partly because it was inert, partly because it was selfish, generally because it was too stupid for the age and the place.1

A good deal of jobbing will be tolerated even by sagacious communities; and the more shrewdness there is in a community the greater is the fertility of projectors for devising new things without sweeping away old things. The forty years of Tory government were years of constantly-increasing shrewdness; and in default of broad reasoning the active minds of that period fell to litigation. In the absence of an effective Parliament the redress of grievances could be attempted by nibblings in law courts; and it is said that the Scottish law courts were not then free from parliamentary passions. Judges were amused, and advocates enriched, by proceedings which a statesman might have made

unnecessary.

That democracy is as obvious a thing as privilege, or as natural as monarchy, is at least a tenable opinion; and some proof thereof may be found in the fact that the High State Ministers, of whom the Dundas family held the Scottish agency, having to use the power the Crown to get over a deadlock when a certain burgh council, through breach of rules, had failed to continue itself, sent down a warrant for the election

of

At a great Abolition Meeting in Edinburgh (October 1830), when an orator spoke for caution and delay in freeing slaves, a man in the crowd shouted, 'Fiat justitia, ruat coelum;' the presiding magistrate rose and said: As the Lord Provost of this town I cannot sit here to hear such sentiments expressed;' and, leaving the chair, he broke up the meeting.