Serious trouble was feared, for the populace threatened to rescue him, and, as we learned afterwards, he had been induced by the provost of the town to step forward to a window overlooking the High Street and beg the people to retire.  This he did, saying:  “If there be a friend of the good cause here to-night, let him fold his arms.”  They did so.  And then, after a pause, he said, “Now depart in peace!"[7] My uncle, like all our family, was a moral-force man and strong for obedience to law, but radical to the core and an intense admirer of the American Republic.

[Footnote 7:  “The Crown agents wisely let the proceedings lapse....  Mr. Morrison was given a gratifying assurance of the appreciation of his fellow citizens by his election to the Council and his elevation to the Magisterial Bench, followed shortly after by his appointment to the office of Burgh Chamberlain.  The patriotic reformer whom the criminal authorities endeavored to convict as a law-breaker became by the choice of his fellow citizens a Magistrate, and was further given a certificate for trustworthiness and integrity.” (Mackie.)]

One may imagine when all this was going on in public how bitter were the words that passed from one to the other in private.  The denunciations of monarchical and aristocratic government, of privilege in all its forms, the grandeur of the republican system, the superiority of America, a land peopled by our own race, a home for freemen in which every citizen’s privilege was every man’s right—­these were the exciting themes upon which I was nurtured.  As a child I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their deaths a service to the state and hence an heroic act.

Such is the influence of childhood’s earliest associations that it was long before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and therefore earned the right to public respect.  There was still the sneer behind for mere pedigree—­“he is nothing, has done nothing, only an accident, a fraud strutting in borrowed plumes; all he has to his account is the accident of birth; the most fruitful part of his family, as with the potato, lies underground.”  I wondered that intelligent men could live where another human being was born to a privilege which was not also their birthright.  I was never tired of quoting the only words which gave proper vent to my indignation: 

    “There was a Brutus once that would have brooked
    Th’ eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
    As easily as a king.”

But then kings were kings, not mere shadows.  All this was inherited, of course.  I only echoed what I heard at home.

Dunfermline has long been renowned as perhaps the most radical town in the Kingdom, although I know Paisley has claims.  This is all the more creditable to the cause of radicalism because in the days of which I speak the population of Dunfermline was in large part composed of men who were small manufacturers, each owning his own loom or looms.  They were not tied down to regular hours, their labors being piece work.  They got webs from the larger manufacturers and the weaving was done at home.