"Tuesday, 21st May [1650].--This day the two hundred and eighty-one common soldiers taken at Kerbester, that were in the Canongate prison--the house ordains forty of them, being forced from Orkney, and have wife and children, to be dismissed. The house gives six of them, being fishers, to the lieutenant-general; also other six fishers of them, given by the parliament to the Marquis of Argyle; and six of them being lusty fellows, given to Sir James Hope, to his lead-mines. The remnant of them the house gives to the Lord Angus and Sir Robert Murray, to recruit the French regiments with, to be transported out of the country to France."[14] [14] Balfour's _Brieffe Memorials of Church and State_, 18. It may be questioned if these gifts were very valuable to their receivers, or if the coerced labour they inferred was worth possessing. Certainly so little valuable was the mere human being to the community, some thirty years afterwards, that the liberal and patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun pleaded hard for the establishment of slavery in Scotland, not as a privilege to the aristocracy, but as a boon to "so many thousands of our people who are, at this day, dying for want of bread." He saw that sheep and oxen, being property, were cared for and kept alive, and, by a process of reasoning which he seemed to consider a very natural one, he thought that he had but to convert his fellow beings into property, to let them be also cared for. Yet, like all men who conceive social paradoxes, he was haunted by the shadow, cast before, of the revulsion of common sense against his proposal, and thus anticipated the obloquy it would incur. "I doubt not that what I have said will meet, not only with all the misconstruction and obloquy, but all the disdain, fury, and outcries, of which either ignorant magistrates or proud lazy people are capable. Would I bring back slavery into the world? Shall men of immortal souls, and by nature equal to any, be sold as beasts? Shall they and their posterity be for ever subjected to the most miserable of all conditions, the inhuman barbarity of masters, who may beat, mutilate, torture, starve, or kill, so great a number of mankind at pleasure? Shall the far greater part of the commonwealth be slaves, not that the rest may be free, but tyrants over them? With what face can we oppose the tyranny of princes, and recommend such tyranny as the highest virtue, if we make ourselves tyrants over the greatest part of mankind? Can any man, from whom such a thing has escaped, ever offer to speak for liberty? But they must pardon me if I tell them, that I regard not names but things; and that the misapplication of names has confounded every thing."[15] [15] Balfour's _Brieffe Memorials of Church and State_, 18.