The manner in which the “English judges,” as the Commissioners were called, performed their duties seems to have given great satisfaction. The Court of Session had been so tyrannical and corrupt that the fairness and purity of the new Court astonished the country. “Justice,” we are told, “was wont to be free and open for none but great men, but now it flows equally for all.” Circuit courts were held throughout the country; and, while crime was firmly punished, the extreme severity of the Scottish criminal system was avoided. Prosecutions for witchcraft were still frequent, but the English judges received the evidence with suspicion; and on one occasion no less than sixty persons, whom the superstition of their own countrymen would have condemned to the flames, were acquitted. The merchants of Scotland were, by the terms of the Union, admitted to all the trading privileges which Englishmen enjoyed. Goods of every description passed duty-free from England to Scotland and from Scotland to England; and there was no restriction on the foreign and colonial trade of Scotland. But these advantages were not fully appreciated; for Scottish commerce was still in its infancy. The Glasgow of to-day, with its miles of wharves and warehouses, its forest of masts, its shipbuilding yards, its crowded streets and handsome squares, had no existence. The merchants of the small town upon the Clyde traded with Ireland, in open boats, for meal, oats, and butter. They shipped coal, herrings, and woollen goods to France in exchange for paper and prunes. They sent to Norway for timber, and to Barbadoes for sugar. But the river Clyde was then so shallow that their ships could not come nearer to the town than a spot fourteen miles distant, where they were unloaded, and the cargoes carried up the river on rafts or in small boats. The English were astonished at the poverty of Scotland. The whole revenue from Customs and Excise was under fifty thousand pounds a year.[80] A monthly assessment of seventy thousand pounds was levied in the towns and counties of England, while Scotland was assessed at only six thousand pounds. The yearly expenditure in Scotland exceeded the revenue; and the balance was paid out of the English treasury. Nevertheless the time of the Union during the Commonwealth was regarded as a time of prosperity. The trade of Glasgow began to flourish. Leith, then the chief port in Scotland, Dundee, and Aberdeen made considerable progress in wealth; and there can be little doubt that if the commercial policy of Cromwell had not been reversed at the Restoration, the merchants of Scotland would have made, during the second half of the seventeenth century, that remarkable advance towards opulence and importance which they made after the Union of 1707.