the structure is,
or is not, to follow?

The English policy in this respect is a wise one, and we have only to
wish they would not insist in keeping it all to themselves. But those
who are most devoted to their own religion have least sympathy for the
feelings of dissenters; and a spirit of proselytism has of late shown
itself in England for extending the benefits of their system, in all
its strength and weakness, to a country which has been hitherto
flourishing and contented under its own. They adopted the conclusion
that all English enactments are right; but the system of municipal law
in Scotland is not English, therefore it is wrong. Under sanction of
this syllogism, our rulers have indulged and encouraged a spirit of
experiment and innovation at our expense, which they resist
obstinately when it is to be carried through at their own risk.

For more than half of last century, this was a practice not to be
thought of. Scotland was during that period disaffected, in bad
humour, armed too, and smarting under various irritating
recollections. This is not the sort of patient for whom an
experimental legislator chooses to prescribe. There was little chance
of making Saunders take the patent pill by persuasion--main force was
a dangerous argument, and some thought claymores had edges.

This period passed away, a happier one arrived, and Scotland, no
longer the object of terror, or at least great uneasiness, to the
British Government, was left from the year 1750 under the guardianship
of her own institutions, to win her silent way to national wealth and
consequence. Contempt probably procured for her the freedom from
interference, which had formerly been granted out of fear; for the
medical faculty are as slack in attending the garrets of paupers as
the caverns of robbers. But neglected as she was, and perhaps
_because_ she was neglected, Scotland, reckoning her progress during
the space from the close of the American War to the present day, has
increased her prosperity in a ratio more than five times greater than
that of her more fortunate and richer sister. She is now worth the
attention of the learned faculty, and God knows she has had plenty of
it. She has been bled and purged, spring and fall, and _talked_ into
courses of physic, for which she had little occasion. She has been of
late a sort of experimental farm, upon which every political student
has been permitted to try his theory--a kind of common property, whe