What should you do, then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set up an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it, lords and commons! they who counsel you to such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane government; it is the liberty, lords and commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us; liberty, which is the nurse of all great arts: this it is which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of Heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged, and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We cannot grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us: but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous; as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may despatch at will their own children.... Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. MONTROSE TO CHARLES I. (1645). =Source.=--_Memorials of Montrose._ Edinburgh: The Maitland Club, 1841. Vol. ii., p. 175. MAY IT PLEASE YOUR SACRED MAJESTY:-- The last dispatch I sent your Majesty word by my worthy friend, and your Majesty's brave servant, Sir William Rollock, from Kintore, near Aberdeen, dated the 14th of September last; wherein I acquainted your Majesty with the good success of your arms in this kingdom, and of the battles the justice of your cause has won over your obdurate rebel subjects. Since Sir William Rollock went I have traversed all the north of Scotland up to Argyle's country; who durst not stay my coming, or I should have given your Majesty a good account of him ere now. But at last I have met with him, yesterday, to his cost; of which your gracious Majesty be pleased to receive the following particulars.