Government and its supporters, was the least; and it was universally applied. Burns nearly lost his excisemanship for too free speaking; and a letter is extant, addressed by him to one of the commissioners of the Scottish Board of Excise, in which, without denying his Liberalism, he protests that it is within the bounds of devout attachment to the Constitution, and implores the commissioner, as “a husband and a father” himself, not to be instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his little ones, “into the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the poet’s crime seems to have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh Liberal paper which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This Johnstone was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the very printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by his connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the Dundas reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as late as 1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting on the Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in Edinburgh. Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs or for counties, in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted quietly, by those whose business it was, in town-halls or in the private rooms of hotels; and the people knew of the matter only by the ringing of a bell, or by some other casual method of announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to Dundas and the existing order of things, pervaded every department and every corner of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church, the Bench, the Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any elements of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure of organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of imperturbable political stagnation.