rhear the fiery debates on the Union in that ultimate
session of the Scottish legislature. Certainly he must have been one of
the thousands of spectators who day by day thronged the purlieus of the
hall where the national assembly met. Of the rage, brooding and deep, or
loud and outspoken, according to temperament, which prevailed amongst
the Edinburgh people at the mere idea of Union with the hated
'Southrons,' he must have been a witness. Nay, he may have been an
onlooker, if not a participant, in that riot which occurred after all
was over,--after Lord-Chancellor Seafield had uttered his brutal _mot_,
'There is the end o' an auld sang,' which gathered up for him the gall
of a nation's execration for a century to come; and after the
Commissioners of both nations had retired to sign the Treaty of Union.
Not, however, to any of the halls of Court did they retire, but to a
dingy cellar (still existing) of a house, 177 High Street, opposite the
Tron Church--being nearly torn limb from limb in getting there. Then the
mob, suddenly realising that now or never they must

'Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen,'

besieged the cellar, intending to execute Jeddart justice or Lynch law
on those they esteemed traitors to their country. Fortunately there was
another means of egress; the party hastily took flight to an arbour in
the garden of Moray House, where the remaining signatures were appended,
and whence all the Commissioners fled post-haste to England, bearing
with them the signed copy of the Treaty.

That stirring time, so pregnant with mighty issues, a time when the weal
or the woe of the future British Empire trembled in the balance,--for
what of achievement could England alone have accomplished, with
Scotland as a hostile neighbour dogging her heels?--must of itself have
been an education to young Ramsay. It both confirmed his patriotism and
widened his political outlook.

Yet when the play was over, the curtain rung down, and the lights gone
out, the lapse of time must to him, as to other observers of the period,
have driven home with stunning force the conviction that the Union
spelled ruin for Scotland as a nation and Edinburgh as a city. For five
decades to come a listless apathy, born of despair, strangled Scottish
enterprise in its birth. The immediate effect of the Union was a serious
diminution in the national trade and commerce. The jealousy of English
merchants, as it had frustrated the Darien Scheme in t