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‘Heu quantum, fati parva tabella vehit!’

It might seem to strangers a trivial thing, that an obscure court, like the presbytery, should proceed in the business of induction by one routine rather than by another; but was it a trivial thing that the power of appointing clergymen should lapse into this perilous dilemma–either that it should be intercepted by the Scottish clerical order, and thus, that a lordly hierarchy should be suddenly created, disposing of incomes which, in the aggregate, approach to half a million annually; or, on the other hand, that this dangerous power, if defeated as a clerical power, should settle into a tenure exquisitely democratic? Was that trivial? Doubtless, the Scottish ecclesiastical revenues are not equal, nor nearly equal, to the English; still, it is true, that Scotland, supposing all her benefices equalized, gives a larger average to each incumbent than England, of the year 1830. England, in that year, gave an average of [pound symbol]299 to each beneficiary; Scotland gave an average of [pound symbol]303. That body, therefore, which wields patronage in Scotland, wields a greater relative power than the corresponding body in England. Now this body, in Scotland, must finally have been the clerus; but supposing the patronage to have settled nominally where the Veto Act had placed it, then it would have settled into the keeping of a fierce democracy. Mr. Forsyth has justly remarked, that in such a case the hired ploughmen of a parish, mercenary hands that quit their engagements at Martinmas, and can have no filial interest in the parish, would generally succeed in electing the clergyman. That man would be elected generally, who had canvassed the parish with the arts and means of an electioneering candidate; or else, the struggle would lie between the property and the Jacobinism of the district.

In respect to Jacobinism, the condition of Scotland is much altered from what it was; pauperism and great towns have worked ‘strange defeatures’ in Scottish society. A vast capital has arisen in the west, on a level with the first-rate capitalists of the Continent–with Vienna or with Naples; far superior in size to Madrid, to Lisbon, to Berlin; more than equal to Rome and Milan; or again to Munich and Dresden, taken by couples: and, in this point, beyond comparison with any one of these capitals, that whilst they are connected by slight ties with the circumjacent country, Glasgow keeps open a communication with the whole land. Vast laboratories of encouragement to manual skill, too often dissociated from consideration of character; armies of mechanics, gloomy and restless, having no interfusion amongst their endless files of any gradations corresponding to a system of controlling officers; these spectacles, which are permanently offered by the castra stativa of combined mechanics in Glasgow and its dependencies (Paisley, Greenock, etc.), supported by similar districts, and by turbulent collieries in other parts of that kingdom, make Scotland, when now developing her strength, no longer the safe and docile arena for popular movements which once she was, with a people that were scattered and habits that were pastoral. And at this moment, so fearfully increased is the overbearance of democratic impulses in Scotland, that perhaps in no European nation–hardly excepting France–has it become more important to hang weights and retarding forces upon popular movements amongst the laboring classes.

This being so, we have never been able to understand the apparent apathy with which the landed body met the first promulgation of the Veto Act in May, 1834. Of this apathy, two insufficient explanations suggest themselves:–1st, It seemed a matter of delicacy to confront the General Assembly, upon a field which they had clamorously challenged for their own. The question at issue was tempestuously published to Scotland as a question exclusively spiritual. And by whom was it thus published? The Southern reader must here not be careless of dates. At present, viz. in 1844, those who fulminate such views of spiritual jurisdiction, are simply dissenters; and those who vehemently withstand them are the church, armed with the powers of the church. Such are the relations between the parties in 1844. But in 1834, the revolutionary party were not only in the church, but (being the majority) they came forward as the church. The new doctrines presented themselves at first, not as those of a faction, but of the Scottish kirk assembled in her highest court. The prestige of that advantage has vanished since then; for this faction, after first of all falling into a minority, afterwards ceased to be any part or section of the church; but in that year 1834, such a prestige did really operate; and this must be received as one of the reasons which partially explain the torpor of the landed body. No one liked to move first, even amongst those who meant to move. But another reason we find in the conscientious scruples of many landholders, who hesitated to move at all upon a question then insufficiently discussed, and in which their own interest was by so many degrees the largest.