rience
supplies to the imagination, the boldness with which a more
established reputation arms the mind, and the silence of the low but
formidable rivals of the higher principles, may concur in providing
this unexpected and little observed effect.'

_August 26, 1854._

OUR TOWN COUNCILS.

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 '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
que