Customhouses and tariffs were rapidly doing what the carnage of Falkirk and Halidon, of Flodden and of Pinkie, had failed to do.

Scotland had some experience of the effects of an union.

She had, near forty years before, been united to England on such terms as England, flushed with conquest, chose to dictate.

That union was inseparably associated in the minds of the vanquished people with defeat and humiliation.

And yet even that union, cruelly as it had wounded the pride of the Scots, had promoted their prosperity.