These words came true. If the statesmen of England had asked, By what means shall we most easily irritate and exasperate the Scottish people? how can we alienate them from England? how can we render the royal family unpopular? how can we destroy the trade of Scotland, which is beginning to improve? how can we throw the country, which is settling down, back into anarchy and confusion? how can we most successfully unite against the Church of England the whole body of the Scottish people? how can we produce a profound distrust in all measures which are proposed by the Council in London? by what means, in short, can we best make the people of Scotland disloyal, poverty-stricken, and rebellious?--if these questions had been asked, some evil councillor might have answered them thus: Pass, he might have said, an Act of Parliament which will destroy their commerce; abolish the Union, and thus destroy free trade between them and the English; restore to the owners of the soil the jurisdictions by means of which they tyrannised over their dependants in the past, and by means of which they will be able to tyrannise over them in the future; restore the tenure of lands by military service, and thus you will, in a few years, people every hamlet over a large portion of the country with restless and idle clansmen, whose only business in life is to foment feuds between their masters, and to seek plunder for themselves; above all things, let the king destroy the Presbyterian Church which he swore to establish when he took that solemn vow, on the faith of which the crown of Scotland was placed upon his head; let the great noble whose hands performed the act of coronation, and to whom a Dukedom and a Garter were promised, be accused of treason for a tardy compliance with the usurper, and let the rules of legal procedure be strained in order to procure his condemnation; eject from their livings the clergy whom the people trust; let enormous fines, far in excess of what the country can bear, be inflicted on every class for the offence of nonconformity; punish with death those who listen to the clergy preaching in the fields because you have driven them from the churches. All this, and a great deal more, was done. The years which followed the Restoration were the most miserable in the history of Scotland. The great source of misery was the desperate contest between the Episcopal and the Presbyterian Churches; but the commercial policy of the English Parliament is what chiefly bears on the question of the Union.