Nevertheless, so far as the improvements in methods increased the productivity of the farms, the new developments were economically sound. But the nation’s increasing foreign trade operated to inflate land values. Merchants who had made money in the Indies wished to retire, and the prestige of setting up as landed gentry combined with the lack of sound corporate investments to bid up the value of land in the more attractive parts of the kingdom to levels where a fair return on the investment was possible only by rack-renting the tenants. Burns himself, and his father before him, were victims of this over-capitalization. They had to pay for marginal lands at rates which would have been fair rentals for the best. And of course speculation in land brought with it speculative banking. In Burns’s youth many of the Ayrshire gentry were crippled or ruined outright by the failure of the Douglas and Heron Bank, which, organized on a lavish scale, quickly got into trouble through excessive loans on real estate. The ruined gentry retired to the Continent, or to lodgings in Edinburgh, and their estates were taken over by nabobs home from the Indies. All this drama of political corruption and of social and economic change was played against the background of the old religious life of Scotland. Though the intellectual life of the country had never been squalid like its physical life, it had at the beginning of the eighteenth century become torpid. From the time of John Knox until after the Act of Union the real government of Scotland, like that of colonial Massachusetts, was a theocracy. The King and the powers of the state were far off from the life of the average peasant or tradesman, but the Kirk watched all his goings out and comings in. Not only did it administer matters which in other times and other nations have been regarded as spiritual concerns, but it also largely took the place of magistrates and police. Critics of puritanism who have chosen colonial New England as their dire example have made a mistake. They should have chosen Scotland. Whatever the theory of church government in New England may have been, in practice the man at odds with the establishment suffered few real hardships beyond the loss of his vote and a moderate amount of discriminatory taxation--provided he had the discretion to mind his business and keep his mouth shut. But in seventeenth-century Scotland estrangement from the church might mean exile from the kingdom, under penalty of practical starvation if the rebel tried to stick it out at home. Except that it lacked the power to relax its heretics to the secular arm for mutilation or death, the Scottish hierarchy was own brother to the Spanish Inquisition.