The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February 1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted, but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to anticipate that promotion would come in due course. But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the _Scots Magazine_ increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat, who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun, patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising, Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional expenditures that came in the class of luxuries--a week’s tour in Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the