Placed on a salient point, dividing two oceans, flanking the two weakest coasts of Britain, and confronting within a few hours’ sail, the mouths of the Baltic and the Elbe—indented with fine harbours, easily made as impregnable as any in Northern Europe, and never boomed like them by half a-year of ice—with a soil of more than ordinary fertility, and a sea-loving people, hardy, intelligent and enterprising—Orkney was well adapted to become the vanguard of northern civilization and commerce. The fostering liberality which has raised a Venice in the Baltic, might easily have made of Orkney a garden or a granary, and of any one of its score of harbours, the Valetta or Sebastapol of the Atlantic and German Oceans. Perhaps with such a position and structure, soil and population, it might even have become (under circumstances less repressive), the powerful centre of an independent Hanseatic league, the check and counterpoise of the usurped monarchy of the seas. But for nearly four centuries, it has been mediatized into an overtaxed and overshadowed dependency, and dragged in the rear of a political and commercial system, in the advantages of which it has been grudgingly permitted to share, but in whose reverses it has ever been made to suffer most unequally; and the few who have cared to trace its history, have been too much absorbed in the painful interest of its actual condition, to indulge in speculations on what it might have been. While these Islands were Scandinavian, if not independent, they had from locality and circumstance some individual action, and a history; but since they became an item of Scotland, and Scotland of the integer of Britain, they have had no self-motion to record, but short episodes of struggle, the spasms of a feverish nationality to be crushed as rebellion against the dominant state. But their fate has been more hard than that of most small nations, merged in another larger than themselves. The ruling power had not only the usual interest in profiting by union, repressing insubordination and veiling oppression, but also (from its defective title) in suppressing its surreptitious profits, lest others should estimate too well the value of Scotland’s gain and Norway’s loss.