To Buchanan’s clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England owes likewise, much of her modern liberty.  But Scotland’s debt to him, it seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public and private.  What the morality of the Scotch upper classes was like, in Buchanan’s early days, is too notorious; and there remains proof enough—­in the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay—­that the morality of the populace which looked up to the nobles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better.  As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French “civilisation,” and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter.  To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she should be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief in the government and the judgments of a living God.  And the tone which Buchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of their day, helped notably that national salvation.  It gathered together, organised, strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality.  It assured the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong; and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever might be the doers of them.  It appealed to the common conscience of men.  It proclaimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.

The tone was stern:  but there was need of sternness.  Moral life and death were in the balance.  If the Scots people were to be told that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an end of morality among them.  Every man, from the greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil.  That method was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very years.  Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty; excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable weaknesses.  The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and Spain.  Knox and Buchanan, the one from the stand-point of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to conscience and to God.  The result was virtue and piety, and that manly independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.