It was generally held, that if there was nothing to do we would _do_ nothing, and if nothing to say we would _say_ nothing; and so thoroughly did we fulfil every expectation that had been previously formed of us, that for three years together we said and did nothing in our official capacity with great _éclat_, and regularly absented ourselves from every meeting of Council except the first, to the entire satisfaction of our constituency. It will not be held, therefore, in the face of so important a fact, that we include in our description all the town magistracies under the existing state of things, and most certainly not all modern town councillors. Nothing, however, can be more certain, we repeat, than that they differ from their constituencies as a class, and that they are chosen to represent them in municipal affairs, just as another and higher class is chosen to represent them in the Legislature--merely because there is no other class in the field. The solid middle-class men of business have, as has been said, something else to employ them, and cannot spare their services. They cannot accept of mere notoriety, with mayhap a modicum of patronate influence attached, as an adequate price for the time and labour which their own affairs demand. It is a peculiar class in the municipal as in the literary field, that 'weigh solid pudding against empty praise,' and come to regard the empty praise as solid enough to outweigh the pudding. Not but that it is a fine thing to be in a Town Council, and to see one's fortnightly speeches flourishing in the public prints. Where else could some of our Edinburgh worthies bring themselves so prominently before the eyes of the country? Where else, for instance, could Councillor ---- impart such universal interest to the fact that he taught in a Sabbath school, and rode out of town 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?'