nal, they would pour forth from their caverns, and appear
armed round the Parliament house, [270]

It might have been expected that every patriotic and enlightened
Scotchman would have earnestly desired to see the agitation appeased,
and some government established which might be able to protect property
and to enforce the law. An imperfect settlement which could be speedily
made might well appear to such a man preferable to a perfect settlement
which must be the work of time. Just at this moment, however, a party,
strong both in numbers and in abilities, raised a new and most important
question, which seemed not unlikely to prolong the interregnum till the
autumn. This party maintained that the Estates ought not immediately
to declare William and Mary King and Queen, but to propose to England a
treaty of union, and to keep the throne vacant till such a treaty should
be concluded on terms advantageous to Scotland, [271]

It may seem strange that a large portion of a people, whose patriotism,
exhibited, often in a heroic, and sometimes in a comic form, has long
been proverbial, should have been willing, nay impatient, to surrender
an independence which had been, through many ages, dearly prized and
manfully defended. The truth is that the stubborn spirit which the arms
of the Plantagenets and Tudors had been unable to subdue had begun to
yield to a very different kind of force. Customhouses and tariffs were
rapidly doing what the carnage of Falkirk and Halidon, of Flodden and of
Pinkie, had failed to do. Scotland had some experience of the effects
of an union. She had, near forty years before, been united to England
on such terms as England, flushed with conquest, chose to dictate. That
union was inseparably associated in the minds of the vanquished people
with defeat and humiliation. And yet even that union, cruelly as it had
wounded the pride of the Scots, had promoted their prosperity. Cromwell,
with wisdom and liberality rare in his age, had established the most
complete freedom of trade between the dominant and the subject country.
While he governed, no prohibition, no duty, impeded the transit of
commodities from any part of the island to any other. His navigation
laws imposed no restraint on the trade of Scotland. A Scotch vessel was
at liberty to carry a Scotch cargo to Barbadoes, and to bring the sugars
of Barbadoes into the port of London, [272] The rule of the Protector
therefore had been propitious to the ind