The effect of these limits of evidence will be obvious on every page of the present work, and such conclusions as the writer has drawn must, of necessity, be merely tentative. It is, in some respects, unfortunate that these conclusions should be so largely negative in character: that the general effect is, not so much to show what the Parliament was, as to point out what it might have been and was not. One may claim, however, that even these negative conclusions will produce ultimately a positive effect, for the reader must seek out other causes for the results that the Parliament did not achieve, and other means for the training that was not supplied by the Estates; and such an essay as this may serve to warn him from the wrong track. It may also be useful as exemplifying the limitations of the doctrine that national progress can be measured by constitutional advance. It is impossible to question the progress of Scotland between the murder of the first and the death of the fourth James; a comparison of the description of Scotland written by Aeneas Sylvius[4] (Pius II), who visited it about 1438, and the account of the resources of the kingdom supplied by Pedro de Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella,[5] is a satisfactory object-lesson. The future Pope writes of a poverty-stricken land, with miserable inhabitants, dwelling in wretched houses. The Spaniard found considerable prosperity and increasing commerce, with houses "all built of hewn stone, and provided with doors, glass windows, and chimneys," and Italian and French furniture. But between 1437 and 1513 it is not easy to discover any single token of definite constitutional development, either in the direction of absolute government or in that of popular liberty. Not only does Scotland fail to produce a constitutional movement like that which characterizes the history of England; she does not develop any kind of constitution at all. No absolute monarch, no oligarchical council, no democratic parliament occupies the stage of her history for any length of time, nor does she know any free cities or any independent duchies. This constant condition of unstable equilibrium is not precisely analogous to the history of any other European country, and least of all is it like that of England, where we are apt to judge of national, by constitutional, progress. Yet, advance there certainly was, if not unbroken, still persistent, and persistently unconnected with questions relating to the constitution.