wn 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?'

By the way, is this latter gentleman acquainted with Smollett's story
of the eccentric Mr. H., and chivalrously bent, on the same principle,
in acknowledging a deity in distress? 'Mr. H., some years ago, being
in the Campidoglio at Rome,' says Smollett, 'made up to the bust of
Jupiter, and bowing very low, exclaimed, in the Italian language, "I
hope, sir, if ever you get your head above water again, you will
remember that I paid my respects to you in your adversity." This
sally,' continues the historian, 'was reported to the Cardinal
Camerlengo, and by him laid before the Pope Benedict XIV., who could
not help laughing at the extravagance of the address, and said to the
Cardinal, "Those English heretics think they have a right to go to the
devil in their own way.'"

Now, standing, as we do, either on the threshold of serious national
controversies of a religious bearing, or already entered upon them, it
would be well to mark and test the facts which it is our present
object specially to point out. It would be well to take measures for
rendering it an as palpable as it is a solid truth, that the municipal
_tail_ of the country's representation no more really represents it in
several very important respects than its parliamentary _head_. It
represents it most inadequately on the Sabbath question now; it will
represent it quite as inadequately in the Popish endowment question by
and by; and if in reality we do not wish to see the battle going
against us on both issues, there must be effective means employed to
demonstrate the fact. In matters of a religious bearing, the
ill-hafted notoriety-men of our Town Councils much more nearly
resemble the upper indifferent classes, from which our legislators are
drafted, than they do the solid bulk of the community.

They are decidedly in the movement party, and form a portion, not of
the