The lesson then learned at such a cost might never have been necessary, with a better adjustment of the political balance, which has been again found wanting and craves a final and a rational settlement. What Fairfoul in 1662 told Middleton had been simply again repeated in 1843 by Muir and Hope, who held the ear of Sir James Graham, to whom Peel had resigned the whole management of Scottish affairs. For all that Graham knew of them, Peel might as well have left them to a foreigner. It took the death of thousands of Irishmen in the potato famine of 1847 to convince the overfed John Bull of even the barest existence of an Irish Question, and many a man went to his grave before Lord Aberdeen, Peel, Graham, and other official people could learn for themselves the true condition of Scotland. Then it was too late, and their regrets were vain. The bill of Bolingbroke brought in, as Burnet said, to weaken the Scottish Church, had produced its logical effects in widening the gulf between the people and the nobility of Scotland; education at Eton, Harrow, and the English Universities had done the rest. Carlyle is known to have regarded the action of the Church in 1843 as the greatest thing in his time; the sole survivor of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone, has expressed the same opinion; while the critical, wiry, and alert little Jeffrey was 'proud of his country.' It bears to-day the mark very strongly of Hugh Miller. Nor need the workman be ashamed of his work--from which, therefore, let him not be separated. CHAPTER V IN SCIENCE 'In league with the stones of the field.'--JOB v. 23. The geologist writes in sand literally and historically, and in the science of the Testimony of the Rocks super-session is the law. 'Such,' says Miller himself in the preface to the first edition of the _Old Red Sandstone_, 'is the state of progression in geological science that the geologist who stands still but for a very little must be content to find himself left behind.' The advancing tide of knowledge leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a list of extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Woodward, Moro and Michel, are to the ordinary mass of readers about as obsolete as the saurian and the mastodon. Only the very few can live in a tide so strong, which bears away not only the older landmarks but even such names as Werner and Hutton, Hall and Fleming.