r been killed in 1858,
the "cordial understanding" between the great nations of Western Europe
would have come to an end, and perhaps they would have gone to war. The
state of foreign affairs in 1860 had much more to do with bringing on
our civil war than appears on the surface of things.

Scotland is a country in which assassins have figured largely, and her
history is more disfigured by their acts than that of any other modern
nation, due allowance being made for the smallness of her territory and
the limited number of her people. This peculiarity in Scotch history is
principally owing to the circumstance, that, as a rule, Scotland has
been more aristocratically dominated than any other community; and
aristocracies are more prolific of assassins than democracies or
monarchies, as before said. Aristocrats, members of privileged classes,
are less patient of restriction, and more prone to take the righting of
what they call their wrongs into their own hands, than are other men.
Violence of all kinds was for centuries more common in Scotland than in
any other European country that had made the same advances in
civilization; and the troubles that overtook so many of her monarchs
were the natural consequences of their position. The House of Stuart has
been called "the Fated Line"; and it deserved the name, because it stood
nominally at the head of a nation that really was ruled by the fiercest
aristocracy that ever plagued a people or perplexed monarchs. The
independence of Scotland, her salvation from that English rule with
which she was threatened by Edward I., whose success would have made her
what Ireland became under English ascendency, was based on a deed which
even some Scotch writers have not hesitated to speak of as
reprehensible,--the killing, namely, of Comyn in a church at Dumfries,
by Bruce and Kirkpatrick; and it seems as if the blood-stain then and
there contracted clung to the Stuarts, who were descended from Bruce by
the female line. The Duke of Rothesay, son of Robert III., and
heir-apparent, was murdered by his uncle, the Duke of Albany, whose
purpose was to divert the crown to his own branch of the family.
Rothesay's brother became James I., and he was assassinated by Sir
Robert Grahame,--the King's offence being that he wished to introduce
something like regular government into Scotland, having learned, the
value of order in England, where he had passed many years as a prisoner.
Grahame was one of the m