The English policy in this respect is a wise one, and we have only to wish they would not insist in keeping it all to themselves.  But those who are most devoted to their own religion have least sympathy for the feelings of dissenters; and a spirit of proselytism has of late shown itself in England for extending the benefits of their system, in all its strength and weakness, to a country which has been hitherto flourishing and contented under its own.  They adopted the conclusion that all English enactments are right; but the system of municipal law in Scotland is not English, therefore it is wrong.  Under sanction of this syllogism, our rulers have indulged and encouraged a spirit of experiment and innovation at our expense, which they resist obstinately when it is to be carried through at their own risk.

For more than half of last century, this was a practice not to be thought of.  Scotland was during that period disaffected, in bad humour, armed too, and smarting under various irritating recollections.  This is not the sort of patient for whom an experimental legislator chooses to prescribe.  There was little chance of making Saunders take the patent pill by persuasion—­main force was a dangerous argument, and some thought claymores had edges.

This period passed away, a happier one arrived, and Scotland, no longer the object of terror, or at least great uneasiness, to the British Government, was left from the year 1750 under the guardianship of her own institutions, to win her silent way to national wealth and consequence.  Contempt probably procured for her the freedom from interference, which had formerly been granted out of fear; for the medical faculty are as slack in attending the garrets of paupers as the caverns of robbers.  But neglected as she was, and perhaps because she was neglected, Scotland, reckoning her progress during the space from the close of the American War to the present day, has increased her prosperity in a ratio more than five times greater than that of her more fortunate and richer sister.  She is now worth the attention of the learned faculty, and God knows she has had plenty of it.  She has been bled and purged, spring and fall, and talked into courses of physic, for which she had little occasion.  She has been of late a sort of experimental farm, upon which every political student has been permitted to try his theory—­a kind of common property, where every juvenile statesman has been encouraged to make his inroads, as in Moray land, where, anciently, according to the idea of the old Highlanders, all men had a right to take their prey—­a subject in a common dissecting room, left to the scalpel of the junior students, with the degrading inscription,—­fiat experimentum in corpore vili.