"A man may ride over all Scotland with a switch in his hand and a hundred pounds in his pocket, which he could not have done these five hundred years," was Mr.Samuel Desborough's summary account afterwards of the state of the country which he had helped to administer under the Protectorate; and Cromwell's own reference to the subject is even more interesting and precise.

Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation," yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society.

It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes.

"The _meaner_ sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;" and "The _middle_ sort of people," he added, "do grow up there into such a substance as makes their lives comfortable, if not better than they were before." Of course, in neither of these classes, any more than from among the dispossessed nobles and lairds, can the sentiment of Scottish nationality and the pain of its abolition have been extinct.

Yet one notices, towards the end of 1656, a soothing even in that respect.
The Scots, all but universally, by that time, had acquired the habit of speaking deferentially of "His Highness" or "His Highness the Lord Protector"; correspondence with Charles II.