land. Steadily, if slowly, the nation rose to its opportunities as well as to its pledges, unhindered by Sentiment and its perpetual shadow Discontent. For the first half of the century, it is true, little progress was made. It was the raw day of early spring. But gradually the land smiled; the thorns and the thistles of Jacobitism were cleared from the ground; the surly political mood of an influential portion of the people passed; and, freed from the old impediments, the national vigour burst forth with irrepressible vitality, and in new forms of Industrial enterprise-in Philosophy, in Literature, in Science, in Politics-expressed itself in a way as original and influential as brilliant. To describe this, to mark the first stirrings of the Modern spirit and its steady leavening influence, is not what is attempted in the following pages. Their object is to do what. : is preparatory to this, and necessary to its true comprehensionto describe the general condition of Scotland when on the eve of this change in other words, to mark the relation of this period, 1688-1707, to the period which followed it. If we truly know what was the condition of Scotland at the opening of the eighteenth century, we should easily be able to mark wherein the Past differed from the Present, and in what, if in any, degree or circumstance we have made national progress. There is a considerable class who are always looking back to what they picturesquely and pathetically call the good old times.' To this class the period referred to has a charm which cannot be broken. The world they say was better then: life was truer and nobler: the hills that girdled the plains were the Delectable mountains: the Land of Beulah was never far off. But to speak in this way is to idealise, and although it always has been natural to man to do this, it ought to be remembered that some of the most extravagant and impossible conceptions of byegone times are due to this humour of blaming the present and admiring the past.* Let us not idealise; let us try to see what the facts of that period plainly show, and hear what they unanimously and distinctly tell. Macaulay's * Hume's Essays: On Populousness of Ancient Nations. History of England, opening and closing paragraphs of third chapter. II. It was not till towards the end of the eighteenth century that Scotland was really one, politically and territorially it must always be borne in mind, therefore, that in 1707 Scotland was that part of Great Britain which lies between Dumbarton and Perth on the north, and the Tweed on the south, including the towns on the north-east coast, and a few baronies in the great straths. These collectively were the Lowlands. They had a population which numbered a little over one million. This body of people was pretty evenly distributed over the country, and was either immediately engaged in farming or in the small trades incident to home-consumption, as we still see in Peebles, Haddington, Selkirk. The villages and hamlets, each seldom more than a few turf or thatch-covered houses in double row, were mean and uncleanly, and unbrightened by the fresh and simple beauty of flower and tendril by porch or window, or bit of garden or greensward by the door. Some of these still survive in the remote districts, and enable us to see what the old Scottish village was, and to judge whether the author of Waverley and the authoress of the Cottagers of Glenburnie spoke falsely or truly in their very unsavoury descriptions of it.* The towns, with only one or two exceptions, were not so big as most modern mining or manufacturing or watering villages; and their uneven, grass-grown streets were fewer in number than the centuries which had passed since their charters had been granted. Whatever they had once been, or promised to be, in commercial enterprise, they were now stricken with the stillness and stupor of decay, and their burgesses, living in the pause which comes betwixt the close of one epoch and the dawn of another, could only live on the recollections of the past, grumble at the present, and forbode ill of the future. Scottish history from the War of Independence to the Revolution of 1688, is simply a succession of scenes which *Everybody must know Scott's description of Tullyveolan, Waverley, ch. 8. Although Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie is out of date now, it is a striking and faithful picture of old Scottish life. Waverley, ch. 72. prove the existence of a state of things in which it was impossible to plough and sow, to weave and build, to extend trade, to introduce manufactures, to gather wealth, to find leisure to think, to observe, to adventure, to invent. The whirl of events drew in and swept on every man. For genera tions the deepest and the darkest passions of our nature were moved to their depths, either by political or religious questions. Households were rent in twain and lived apart in open, mutual hatred. Irresistibly compelled by the logic of their feelings, all men took sides. As the religious crisis deepened, they felt that the one thing to live for was the spread and success of the particular dogma in which they each believed. It was neither Trade nor Money which men then cared most for. The motive power of action was the hope of the triumph of ideas which seemed to them to be Absolute Truth, fixed in the nature of things. Grasping these with an uncompromising realism, all their energy and time were consumed in struggling for their general adoption and spread. It would have been strange if a country in these circumstances, so poor in itself and so distant from the chief centres of commerce, had shown any greatness of Trade, and the refinement, the luxury, the art, which always follow in duə time upon the possession of wealth. Many of these burghs owed their importance to other causes than trade. St. Andrews, Dunfermline, and Melrose, for instance, were dependent upon the Cathedral or great Abbey; Edinburgh, Stirling, and Linlithgow, upon the Royal Castle or desmesne; and towns like Elgin and Arbroath, where bishops had early fixed their sees, had a special means of income of their own. These are the towns which figure in the Middle Period of Scottish history, as centres of Religion, of Learning, of Political life; all the others, excepting Berwick-on-Tweed and Aberdeen, lived by a petty home trade. The general character and the social and moral atmosphere of the old Scottish burgh, we can fortunately realise to the life from the Burgh Records now in course of publication; and certainly they exhibit one of the most interesting, if also unattractive aspects of our history. Created by David I. the Alfred and the Augustus of Early Scotland, the laws he framed for them were after the law which regulated the trade of the larger European marts, and which he had seen in operation during his residence in England, where the State, for so long through the great London Companies, took a paternal care of the interests of the people. These burghal laws and privileges fairly answered their primary objects; they encouraged both baron and bishop to gather their men and serfs for peaceful purposes into little lots, and when so gathered helped and protected them in their infant efforts and trade, and their rude beginnings in civilisation. But what was perhaps really necessary for the burghs in their first, that is, their feudal stage, was likely to prove to be both hindersome and harmful when the country passed beyond it. And this these laws had become previous to the eighteenth century. In the early part of it, and simultaneous with the rise of the mercantile spirit, serious complaints and definite objections were common. Nor could it be otherwise. Monopoly was the one regulative principle of all production, which, with the privileges enjoyed and of course jealously held by the principal crafts, made extension of trade by the natural play of the laws of supply and demand an impossibility, and every craft a close, aristocratic body. No doubt the burgh laws sought to protect the buyer from the knavery of the maker, and to ensure honest and faithful dealing between man and man. But if they generally succeeded in ensuring, in that simple phase of commercial development, to every man that the article sold should be sound, it is certain that they succeeded in making it dear and scarce. The corn which was brought to the market might be extremely good, but as none was or could be imported, Monopoly, the parent of Scarcity, now and then slew its hundreds by Famine. The cloth which was declared to be of honest make, was after all no better than what could be shown by neighbouring unfreemen; but, as a privileged article, was of course much higher priced. * Robertson's Scotland Under Her Early Kings, Vol. I. pp. 318-20. + Froude's History of England, ch. i. The Interest of Scotland Considered. Edinburgh, 1733, pp. 50-58. As we linger over the pages of the Burgh Records, a picture of the Trade and Finance of those byegone days, more vivid and accurate than we get anywhere else, rises distinctly before us. The old times live again. The exceeding smallness of the interests involved, and the absence of every sign of plenty and comfort and growing wealth, with their natural tendencies to expansiveness in new and more ambitious forms are visible on every page. Money is a mere name. The chill and dismal quiet of an extremely poor country, which has no resources or knows of none, are everywhere felt. The waggon and the warehouse are unknown; the bank and the exchange are not yet dreamt of. And as distinctly visible is this other proof of a primitive order of society, or a narrow range of interests-namely, the incessant interference of the authorities with the free current of trade and labour and general social life. Nothing indeed can be conceived so absurd as not to have been, under the pretence of promoting honesty of dealing, good order or religion, subject to this meddlesomeness. So unlike is this, and the laws which created and sanctioned it, to anything in the present day, that the illustrations of it in those pages may be referred to as exhibiting in the clearest light the chief points of difference between the Middle and the Modern periods of Scottish history. We shall realise this difference when we descend into and dwell upon details. Fletcher of Saltoun, no favourer of the Union, speaks of Scotland having one-fifth of the population, but only one-thirtieth of the wealth of England.* And his statement agrees with all we know. The entire currency of Scotland at the time of the Union was little more than half a million sterling,† which is less than the private fortune of many living Englishmen; and gold coin was so seldom seen among the people that it is all but certain the word silver, or in Scots phrase 'siller,' became in consequence the national synonym for money.‡ A fraction of a farthing, as Mr. Burton * First Discourse. + Chambers' Domestic Annals of Scotland, Vol. III., p. 332. Ibid., p. 212. |