Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous, victims, and before the series of trials--conducted with such disregard of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes--was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer, and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his convictions. Such was the background against which Burns undertook to display himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned, actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff, and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and Palmer.