Everyone played the game, and took the rules for granted. Why wait for merited promotion, if you could get it quicker by pulling wires? The only man Sir Walter Scott ever deliberately cut was the one who publicly criticized him for securing his brother’s appointment to a post which he knew was soon to be abolished--with a pension for the ousted incumbent. It was a comfortable system for those on the inside. As for the others, they were expected to do their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them. But it was not merely in political jobs that the influential classes were doing well for themselves. The Act of Union had admitted Scottish merchants to the privileges of the colonial trade formerly open only to the English. Throughout the eighteenth century the south of Scotland experienced a whole series of industrial and real estate booms. Though by twentieth-century standards of bankruptcy the booms were small and local, they had all the familiar characteristics. Glasgow and its neighbourhood, for instance, when once it had recovered from the losses of the crazy Darien Expedition--as wild a speculation as the later Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea madness in England--throve soberly on its steadily increasing commerce with the West Indies and the American Colonies. The passerby today, between the Trongate and the Broomielaw, may read in Union Street and George Square how mercantile Scotland felt towards the loss of its parliament, and find Jamaica and Virginia Streets underscoring the reason; further west, St. Vincent Street, Nile Street, Pitt Street, and Wellington Street show the direction of Glaswegian sympathies in the long struggle with Napoleon. And since commerce is by definition two-sided the ships which brought back American cotton and tobacco and sugar took out Scottish linens and woolens and shoes from steadily growing centres of manufacture.