By the middle of the century Scottish affairs had settled into an order which might alter in degree, but would not alter in kind, for two generations at least. Politically, the country was little more than a conquered province. Economically it was beginning to emerge from age-old poverty, but the new prosperity of the lucky few was widening the gap between them and the poor and still further depressing the latter. Religiously it was awakening from the nightmare of Calvinism which had paralysed free thought and free action for two centuries. Intellectually its literary life was being overwhelmed by the fashions and standards of England, and its educated citizens were suffering from an inferiority complex of national scope. When Warren Hastings was impeached, Burns was angry because it was done in the name of the Commons of England and not of Great Britain. Had he expressed his opinion in public, instead of in a private letter, it would have roused little sympathy among his more influential countrymen. Most would have dismissed it as the rant of a fanatic; a few would have held it downright treason. There was no money in being a Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour. The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one man--the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national boss. He ‘suggested’ the choice of the sixteen Scottish peers who were to represent their country in the House of Lords; he controlled the election of the forty-five members of the Commons; his word was law as to all appointive offices. Fifteen members of the Commons were chosen by the burgh councils--self-perpetuating groups which in ‘the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs’ allowed no outsider to intrude on their privileges and their graft. The other thirty were chosen by the counties, and in all Scotland there were fewer than three thousand qualified electors, every man of whom was ticketed as to party allegiance and family connection. Most of them also had their prices plainly marked on their tickets. Of course the price need be nothing so crude as cash. Every job, from a cadetship with the East India Company to the governorship of a province, was obtainable by influence, and by influence only; hence there were plenty of ways of swaying a man’s vote, especially if he had a rising family of hungry younger sons, without soiling his fingers with gold.