promise. His chief work was a marble statue of Queen Victoria, which he executed for the city of Aberdeen. He died in 1867, at the age of thirty-eight. Henry B. Smith was born in Aberdeen in 1857. He executed a considerable number of small busts in marble. His chief work was a bronze statue of Burns, which was unveiled in Aberdeen on the 17th of September 1892. He was a sculptor of great promise. He died on the 16th of April 1893, at the early age of thirty-six. In short, the progress of art in Scotland is one of the most striking facts in the recent history of civilisation. The chief cities have their academies, institutes, and schools of art, galleries and museums; and even many of the smaller towns show their appreciation of art in many ways. Let us hope that the culture of art, in all its branches, shall be still more widely diffused in the future than it has been in past; that the resources of elevated feeling and refined enjoyment may continue to be opened and expanded. CHAPTER LI. Political and Social Movements. THE scope of this chapter naturally assumes a somewhat general was character, as the course of political events in Scotland greatly influenced by external power and circumstances; she had not a government of her own, and even the spirit of the British Ministry often seriously affected the executive in Scotland during the latter part of the last century, and the early part of this one. I will, in the first place, indicate briefly the political state of the nation in the later part of the eighteenth century; and in the second, touch on the rise of political discussion, of the principles of liberty and freedom, political rights, and reform; the attempts to suppress them, and their ultimate triumph. : In the last century there was no popular representation in Scotland. The town councils elected the burgh members of parliament. Excepting Edinburgh, which had a member to itself, there was only one member for a district of four or five burghs for instance, Perth, Dundee, St. Andrews, Cupar, and Forfar, were classed together, and had but one member; Aberdeen, Montrose, Arbroath, Brechin, and Inverbervie, formed another group, with one member of parliament, and so on amongst the other burghs. The mode of election was this :Each town council elected a delegate, and these five or four delegates met and elected the member of parliament. And it is a well ascertained fact, that the Governments of the day, instead of bribing. the town councils, bribed the delegates, or, for the sake of economy, only one or two of them, if this could secure a majority. Such was the representation of the burghs of Scotland prior to 1832. I have examined the rolls of the freeholders or electors of the different counties of Scotland, as made up at the meetings for elec' ing their representatives to the Parliament, summoned to meet at Westminster on the 10th of August, 1790, and find that the total number of electors was then 2652. So in those days it was an easy matter for the Government to manage the elections as they thought fit. The public press was only in its infancy, and a pretty hard struggle had to be fought ere it obtained freedom of discussion. Corporations and public bodies might speak for themselves, but the opinion of the general community was not recognised as having any claim to be heard or consulted. The Government of those days recognised no public opinion save that which issued from themselves or their official organs. So long as the mass of the people plodded on quietly at their daily occupations, the corruption of the political fabric was concealed behind its official trappings; but when the French Revolution burst out, it sent a shock of alarm and panic into the heart of every Government in Europe. The effects of this soon appeared in the administration of Scotland. The terror of revolution seized the British Government; reason itself shook, and justice and humanity were for a time driven beyond the gates of mercy. Everything rung with the French Revolution, which was made the all in all for about twenty years. "Everything, not this or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event." 1 Although there is no evidence that any considerable number of persons in Scotland ever embraced the French revolutionary principles, there were, of course, many people who wished to reform the existing political system of government. But the reigning Toryism of the time, in order to retain its monopoly of power, fixed upon all reformers and opponents the stigma of Jacobins, revolutionaries, and seditious persons. The real Whigs were then very few in Scotland, and they were viewed by the Government and its supporters with extreme suspicion; even such a man as Dugald Stewart was an object of great secret alarm for several years. When such was the feeling in Edinburgh, we may easily imagine what must have been the position of men who held liberal opinions in the country at large; still, such persons existed throughout the nation, but were subjected to contumely, insult, and personal loss and danger for many years. In the end of the year 1792, some attempts were made to form political associations; and in December, a meeting of delegates was held in Edinburgh, some of whom had come from Ross and Sutherlandshire. The Lord Advocate, Dundas, immediately set the arm of the law in motion, and the most notable and talented man connected with the movement, Thomas Muir, was arrested on the 2nd of January, 1793, but was liberated on bail. After instructing his legal 1 Lord Cockburn's Memorials of his Time, p. 80; 1856. 2 Mr. Muir was born in Glasgow in 1765, and educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Having chosen the legal profession, and studied law, he was called to the Scottish bar in 1787. He was a man of high intellectual abilities, and an ardent advocate of political reform. agent to inform him whenever a criminal indictment was served upon him, he proceeded to France. His trial was finally fixed on the 25th of February; but Muir failed to reach Edinburgh on the day fixed for his trial, accordingly he was declared an outlaw, and his name deleted from the roll of the Faculty of Advocates. He returned to Scotland in July, and was at once apprehended; and on the 30th he was brought before the Court and charged with sedition. The indictment was of enormous length-a curious mass of legal verbiage; but the chief point in it was that the prisoner at the bar was connected with political associations, whose sole end was to agitate for parliamentary reform. Braxfield, then Lord Justice-clerk, was the leading spirit in this trial, and in the other political trials of the period; and it has long since been admitted that he was notoriously prepossessed and prejudiced against all persons charged with political crimes. The juries were usually packed in these trials, and there was not only a bias against such prisoners, but also an absolute straining for convictions was manifested by the bench; nothing so 3"But the giant of the bench was Braxfield. His very name makes people start yet. Strong built and dark, with rough eyebrows, powerful eyes, threatening lips, and a low growling voice, he was like a formidable blacksmith. His accent and his dialect were exaggerated Scotch; his language, like his thoughts, short, strong, and conclusive." "It is impossible to condemn his conduct as a criminal judge too gravely, or too severely. It was a disgrace to the age. A dexterous and practical trier of ordinary cases: he was harsh to prisoners even in his jocularity, and to every counsel whom he chose to dislike. . . It may be doubted if he was ever so much in his element as when tauntingly repelling the last despairing claim of a wretched culprit, and sending him to Botany Bay or the gallows with an insulting jest; over which he would chuckle the more from observing that correct people were shocked. As he once said to an eloquent culprit at the bar: 'Ye're a verra clever chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o' a hanging.' Hang was his phrase for all kinds of punishment. He, as the head of the Court, and the only powerful man it contained, was the real director of its proceedings. The reports make his abuse of the judgment-seat bad enough; but his misconduct was not so fully disclosed in formal decisions and charges as it transpired in casual remarks and general manner. 'Let them bring me prisoners, and I'll find them law' used to be openly stated as his suggestion when an intended political prosecution was marred by anticipated difficulties. Mr. Horner, one of the jurors, in Muir's case, told me that when he was passing behind the bench to get into the box, Braxfield, who knew him, whispered, Come awa, Maister Horner, come awa, and help us to hang ane o' thae daamned scoondrels.'"-Lord Cockburn's Memorials of his Time, pp. 113-117. grossly unjust had taken place in Scotland since the seventeenth century. Muir admitted that he had agitated concerning the representation of the people in parliament, but denied having used seditious language or disseminated seditious literature. The judges were prepossessed against him, the jury was packed, and there was little hope for the prisoner at the bar; nevertheless, Muir addressed the jury in a memorable speech, which occupied three hours in its delivery. When he concluded, a shout of applause was raised by the audience in the gallery and the passages of the court, the echo of which is not even yet spent. In vain Lord Braxfield shouted "Clear the court," and he then said, that this applause which the prisoner had received had only confirmed his conviction that it would be dangerous to allow Muir to remain in the country. He next concentrated all his powers, and rose to sum up and address the jury, and amongst other and equally remarkable things, his lordship said : : "This is the question for consideration. Is the panel guilty of sedition or is he not. Now, before this question can be answered, two things must be attended to that require no proof. First, that the British Constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better. For is not every man secure? Does not every man reap the fruit of his own industry, and sit safely under his own fig tree? The next circumstance is that there was a spirit of sedition in this country last winter which made every good man uneasy. Yet Mr. Muir had at that time gone about among ignorant country people, making them forget their work, and told them that a reform was absolutely necessary for preserving their liberty, which, if it had not been for him, they would never have thought was in danger. I do not doubt that this will appear to the jury, as it does to me, to be sedition. "The next thing to be attended to is the outlawry. Running away from justice-that was a mark of guilt. And what could he do in France at that period? Pretending to be an ambassador to a foreign country without lawful authority, that is rebellion; and he pretends to have had influence with those wretches, the leading men there. And what kind of folks were they? I never liked the French all my days, and now I hate them. The panel's haranguing such multitudes of ignorant weavers about their grievances might have been attended with the worst consequences to the peace of the nation and the safety of our glorious Constitution. Mr. Muir might |