The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before. Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’ from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American Revolution--one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a better man’ than William Pitt--and his admiration would be intensified by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects, indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh. Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution. A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster, advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude, John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see amended.’