Chapter XXVIII
The Mercantile Class in Edinburgh—The Town Council—Political Corruption—Petty Tyranny—The Town Clerk—James Laing, Head of the Police—His Methods with Disturbers of the Peace—Anecdotes of Laing and Dugald Stewart.
At the end of the eighteenth century there was no social intercourse between the aristocratic, which was, generally speaking, the educated, class and the mercantile portion of the community. Wealth had not yet become a passport into ‘society.’ Birth and ancestry, on the contrary, were so, however poor the possessor of an old name might be. The professions, especially that of law, were still mainly recruited from noble or gentle families. As yet also, no traders in Edinburgh had made great fortunes or could afford social display. As individuals, therefore, business people were of no account. Politically, having no votes they had no direct power, and in all public matters their general attitude was one of complete subserviency to their betters. This, of course, was looked upon by both classes as the natural state of things, and explains the humble place occupied by the shopkeeping characters in the Waverley Novels. Lord Cockburn, speaking of the city government, records that everything of that kind was managed by the town council: light, water, education, trade, the Port of Leith, the streets, the poor, the police. He describes the Council Chamber as a low, dark, blackguard-looking room, entering from a covered passage, on the site of the present Signet Library. The chamber was a low-roofed room, very dark and very dirty, with some small dens off it for clerks. ‘Within this Pandemonium sat the town council, omnipotent, corrupt, impenetrable. Nothing was beyond its grasp; no variety of opinion disturbed its unanimity, for the pleasure of Dundas was the sole rule for every one of them. Silent, powerful, submissive, mysterious, and irresponsible, they might have been sitting in Venice.’ Speaking of Scottish town councils in general, our authority uses even stronger language. ‘Many of the small ones were in the lowest possible condition of public and private morality. In general, they were sinks of political and municipal iniquity, steeped in the baseness which they propagated, and types and causes of the corruption that surrounded them.’ This is just the picture that one would draw, if inclined to be censorious and not yielding to any sense of humour, from the very interesting series of facts recorded in John Galt’s book, The Provost. Depend upon it, there was a good deal of human nature even in an ‘unreformed’ town council. Of their corrupt subservience to the powers in place there can be no doubt, but they had at least as much of the great quality of efficiency as their reformed successors. Such as they were, they were generally the best men of the best class in each community, and few men of the same type could now be got to enter the popularly elected body. And what would we not give now for the old peace and quietness? The silence would indeed be cheaply bought at the price of the mystery and irresponsibility. Conscience is the only guarantee against corruption, which may flourish like a green bay-tree under popular election. In 1799, it seems, Mr. Smith, a councillor of Edinburgh, electrified the city by a pamphlet in which he showed that the burgh was bankrupt. What subjects would Mr. Smith not have found for his financial genius if he had lived in 1899? What pamphlets might Mr. Smith have printed on ‘the Edinburgh Cable Tramways and their cost,’ or on ‘the Usher Hall Sinking Fund.’ Verily, life in a city might be tolerable but for our town councils.
The old town council had a very simple method of getting their work done. They just left everything to the town clerk and the manager of police. This seems to be the modern method, minus the vulgar talk and reports in the newspapers. The town-clerk was Mr. John Gray. Would he were here to-day: a man who could hold his tongue and do jobs quietly! Peace to the ashes of the good Gray: a judicious man, with a belly, white hair, and decorous black clothes; famous for drinking punch; a respectable and useful officer, devoted to his superiors, and chock-full of municipal wisdom. The manager of police was James Laing, about whom we have anecdotes which endear him to the heart of every lover of quiet. James was a hater of noise at untimely hours. He may have been prevented from writing his reminiscences by the rowdy din and uproar which seems to have been then, as it is now, at all hours of the night (constant up to midnight, in the small hours sporadic) as remarkable a feature of residential Edinburgh as its deadly east wind. Fortunately, James had the power, now defunct and obsolete, of making the police operate. One evening the usual demoniac orgy of noise was proceeding, driving peaceful citizens to profanity and despair. The whole devil’s tattoo was caused by a mere handful of tipsy hooligans—six or eight baker lads, it seems, of respectable though humble parentage. James set the police in motion, the lads were promptly arrested, and next morning, when the master baker growled ‘Ubi est ille apprentice?’ echo answered promptly, ‘Non est inventus.’ A lawyer, however, who took an interest in the family of one of them, went that morning, greatly daring, to James Laing to inquire, when he was told he need give himself no trouble; ‘they are all beyond Inchkeith by this time.’ With a promptness of device only equalled by his firmness of purpose, this benefactor of suffering humanity had sent the disciples of Din to exert their demoniac disturbances on the high seas! They had, in fact, been shipped on board a tender in Leith Roads, which James knew was to sail that very morning. After this, one is not astonished to learn that the great Laing was a philosopher and entertained an immense reverence for Dugald Stewart. Stewart used to tell an anecdote which proves that Laing, besides discovering the best means of preserving quiet in the streets, had also solved the problem of finding healthy employment for the police in their ‘hours of idleness.’ The Professor was walking very early one morning in the Meadows, when he saw a band of men within the enclosure busily engaged apparently in turning up the turf. Upon going up to them, he found his friend Laing commanding the operations, who explained that in these short light nights there was nothing going on with the blackguards, ‘and so, ye see, Mr. Professor, I’ve just brought oot the constables to try our hands at the moudieworts.’ They were catching moles.