Waterfalls which now turn the wheels of immense factories would have resounded in a wilderness.

New Lanark would still have been a sheepwalk, and Greenock a fishing hamlet.

What little strength Scotland could under such a system have possessed must, in an estimate of the resources of Great Britain, have been, not added, but deducted.

So encumbered, our country never could have held, either in peace or in war, a place in the first rank of nations.

We are unfortunately not without the means of judging of the effect which may be produced on the moral and physical state of a people by establishing, in the exclusive enjoyment of riches and dignity a Church loved and reverenced only by the few, and regarded by the many with religious and national aversion.