If the Bill was calculated to irritate the susceptibilities of the Scotch peers, there were attendant circumstances still more irritating. The three Scotch judges were summoned from Scotland to answer certain legal questions connected with the debate. On their arrival a fresh debate sprang up on the question whether they should be {67} examined at the Bar of the House of Lords or upon the wool-sacks. The Scotch peers considered it disrespectful to their judges to be examined at the Bar of the House of Lords, and urged some of their arguments against it in terms of ominous warning. It is curious to find a speaker in this debate telling the Government that the strength of the legal union that existed between England and Scotland depended entirely upon the way in which the people of Scotland were treated by the majority in the two Houses. If any encroachment be made, the speaker urged, on those articles which have been stipulated between the two countries, the legal union will be of little force: the Scotch people will be apt to ascribe to the present royal family all the ills they feel or imagine they feel; and if they should unanimously join in a contrary interest they would be supported by a powerful party in England as well as by a powerful party beyond the seas. For such reasons the speaker urged that any insult, or seeming insult, to the people of Scotland was especially to be avoided, and any disrespect to the Scotch judges would be looked upon by the whole nation as a violation of the Articles of Union and an indignity to the Scottish people. The use of such words in the House of Lords within two-and-twenty years of the rising of 1715 ought to have been found most significant. No one who was present and who heard those words could guess indeed that within eight more years Scotland and England would witness a rising yet more formidable than that of the Old Pretender, a rising which would put for a moment in serious peril the Hanoverian hold of the throne. But they might well have been accepted as of the gravest import by those who voted for the attendance of the Scotch judges at the Bar of the House of Lords, and who carried their point by a majority of twelve.