While he lived, or the family remained, the danger continued to threaten England, and the heart of Scotland to be fevered with a secret hope.  The old conflict of nationalities had been terribly envenomed by the cruelties of Cumberland and the license of the conquering troops.  There was the same temptation ever lurking at the ear of France to whisper new assaults upon England.  Ireland was held as a subjugated province, and was in a state of chronic discontent.  To either wing of the British empire, alliance with, nay, submission to France, was considered preferable to remaining in the Union.

Thus far we have been looking at probabilities from the stand-point of their times.  There is a curious parallelism in the essentials of that conflict with the present attempt to elevate King Cotton to the throne of this Republic.  It is close enough to show that the same great rules have hitherto governed human action with unerring fidelity.  The Government displayed at the outset the same vacillation; the people were apparently as thoroughly indifferent to the Hanoverian cause as the Northern merchants, before the fall of Sumter, to the prosperity of Lincoln’s administration.  The Russell of 1745, writing to the French court his views of the public sentiment of England and especially of London, probably gave an account of it not very dissimilar to that which the Russell of 1861 wrote to the London “Times” after his first encounter with the feeling of New York.  There were doubtless the same assurances on the part of confident partisans that the whole framework of the British government would crumble at the first attack.  There were, too, the same extravagant alarms, the same wild misrepresentations, the same volunteer enthusiasm on the part of loyal subjects a little later on in the history.  There was on the part of the rebels the same confidence in the justice of their cause, the same utter blindness to results, as in the devotees of Slavery.  There was then, as now, an educated and cultivated set of plotters, moved by personal ambition, swaying with almost absolute power the minds of an ignorant and passionate class.  It was the combat so often begun in the world, yet so inevitably ending always in the same way, between misguided enthusiasm and the great public conviction of the value of order, security, and peace.

The enmity seemed hopeless; the insurrection was a smouldering fire, put out in one corner only to be renewed in another.  If Virginia is a country in which a guerrilla resistance can be indefinitely prolonged, it is more open than the plains of Holland in comparison with the Highlands of that era.  Few Lowlanders had ever penetrated them,—­scarcely an Englishman.  It was supposed that in those impregnable fastnesses an army of hundreds might defy the thousands of the crown.  At Killiecrankie, Dundee and his Highlanders had beaten a well-appointed and superior force.  Dundee had himself been repulsed by a handful of Covenanters at Loudoun Heath through the strength of their position.  Montrose had carried on a partisan war against apparently hopeless odds.  To overrun England might be a mad ambition, but to stand at bay in Scotland was a thing which had been again and again attempted with no inconsiderable success.