But worse, and more unwarrantable, if possible, are your reflections on the character of the gentlemen who furnished _Blackwood_ with his agricultural statistics. "The farmers of _Blackwood_ are content to be held up, for a political purpose, in an aspect discreditable to the national character as Scottish agriculturists," (p. 21.) You describe these gentlemen as venal subservient tools, ready to do a discreditable job for a political purpose. I must be permitted to tell you that this is a false and childish calumny. Many of these parties I know, and they are incapable of such baseness. More honourable or independent men are not in the kingdom, and that they should sell themselves to serve a purpose is a charge sufficiently malignant, but too absurd to meet with credence. What unprincipled purpose could their statistics serve? Their statistics seemed to class them with the political minority in Parliament at least. This did not indicate selfishness: commissioner-ships they were not courting. Some of them might be opposing the Free-trade theories of their proprietors: this does not look like servile meanness. You must have known that, on the question of politics generally, these farmers did not all agree with _Blackwood_; that on many points they differ with one another, and that yet they unite in testifying to the disastrous effects of Free Trade on the agriculture of the nation. The evidence of their integrity and conscientiousness is irresistible, and it has been felt to be so. And yet here are you, with foolish recklessness, insinuating that about thirty of the best known, most eminent, and best-informed agriculturists in the kingdom, who never once mentioned your name, are capable of conduct mean and dishonourable, and content to be held up for a political purpose. If your gratuitous and unprovoked accusation should lower you henceforth in the estimation of the tenant-farmers of your native land, you have yourself alone to blame. It has ever been reckoned the proof of meanness, and the evidence of quackery, in any member of a profession to revile his brethren, and to disparage the well-won reputation of its most distinguished members. In this unenviable position you have placed yourself. The native insignificance of the accuser renders his accusation harmless, but it cannot shield him from the consequences of his rash and presumptuous folly.