As a child I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their deaths a service to the state and hence an heroic act.
Such is the influence of childhood's earliest associations that it was long before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and therefore earned the right to public respect.

There was still the sneer behind for mere pedigree--"he is nothing, has done nothing, only an accident, a fraud strutting in borrowed plumes; all he has to his account is the accident of birth; the most fruitful part of his family, as with the potato, lies underground." I wondered that intelligent men could live where another human being was born to a privilege which was not also their birthright.

I was never tired of quoting the only words which gave proper vent to my indignation: "There was a Brutus once that would have brooked Th' eternal devil to keep his state in Rome As easily as a king." But then kings were kings, not mere shadows.

All this was inherited, of course.

I only echoed what I heard at home.
Dunfermline has long been renowned as perhaps the most radical town in the Kingdom, although I know Paisley has claims.