_representative_
Scotland should have twenty-five _permanent_ peers. From his new hatred
of the Prince of Wales, Argyll favoured the Bill, as did the others of
the sixteen of the moment, because they would be among the permanencies.
The Scottish Jacobite peers (not representatives) and the Commons of both
countries opposed the Bill. The election of a Scottish representative
peer at this juncture led to negotiations between Argyll and Lockhart as
leader of the suffering Jacobites, but terms were not arrived at; the
Government secured a large Whig majority in a general election (1722),
and Walpole began his long tenure of office.

ENCLOSURE RIOTS.

In 1724 there were some popular discontents. Enclosures, as we saw, had
scarcely been known in Scotland; when they were made, men, women, and
children took pleasure in destroying them under cloud of night.
Enclosures might keep a man's cattle on his own ground, keep other men's
off it, and secure for the farmer his own manure. That good Jacobite,
Mackintosh of Borlum, who in 1715 led the Highlanders to Preston, in 1729
wrote a book recommending enclosures and plantations. But when, in 1724,
the lairds of Galloway and Dumfriesshire anticipated and acted on his
plan, which in this case involved evictions of very indolent and ruinous
farmers, the tenants rose. Multitudes of "Levellers" destroyed the loose
stone dykes and slaughtered cattle. They had already been passive
resisters of rent; the military were called in; women were in the
forefront of the brawls, which were not quieted till the middle of 1725,
when Lord Stair made an effort to introduce manufactures.

MALT RIOTS.

Other disturbances began in a resolution of the House of Commons, at the
end of 1724, _not_ to impose a Malt Tax equal to that of England (this
had been successfully resisted in 1713), but to levy an additional
sixpence on every barrel of ale, and to remove the bounties on exported
grain. At the Union Scotland had, for the time, been exempted from the
Malt Tax, specially devised to meet the expenses of the French war of
that date. Now, in 1724-1725, Scotland was up in arms to resist the
attempt "to rob a poor man of his beer." But Walpole could put force on
the Scottish Members of Parliament,--"a parcel of low people that could
not subsist," says Lockhart, "without their board wages." Walpole
threatened to withdraw the ten guineas hitherto paid weekly by Government
to those legisl