What was the method of the despotism? It was very peculiar, and at the same time very simple and natural. Mr. Dundas, sitting in the House of Commons, first as member for the shire of Edinburgh, but from 1787 onwards as member for Edinburgh itself, was a leading power in the Pitt Administration. On joining that administration he had not resumed his old office of Lord Advocate (which was given to his friend Hay Campbell), but had been content with resuming his former post of the Treasurership of the Navy; to which were subsequently added in succession the Presidency of the Board of Control for Indian Affairs (i.e. the Ministry for India), the Home-Secretaryship, the Secretaryship for War, and the First Lordship of the Admiralty. It was perhaps as Minister for India that he most usefully distinguished himself in his capacity as a British statesman. But it was in his other capacity as sovereign minister for Scotland that he laboured most characteristically. Continually going and coming, shuttle-wise, between London and Edinburgh, he was known to carry all Scotland in his pocket. His colleagues, on the one hand, made Scotland entirely over to him; and he, on the other, contracted to keep Scotland quiet for them, and to give them the full use of the united Scottish influence in Parliament. His means, as regarded his countrymen, were very efficient. They consisted, apart from the mere power of his own tact and talent, in the uncontrolled use of patronage. The population of Scotland at that time did not exceed a million and a half,—a population in which, according to the ordinary calculation, there could not be more than about three hundred and fifty thousand adult males. This was a nice little compact body to keep in order, and not above one man’s strength, if he had offices enough at his disposal. But it was not even necessary to deal with all this little mass directly. There was no popular representation in Scotland. Fifteen out of the five-and-forty Scottish members of the House of Commons were members for burghs; and these were elected by the town-councils, who were themselves self-elected, and nearly permanent. Nay, the Edinburgh town-council alone returned a member directly; the other burgh-members were for “districts of burghs,” and were elected by delegates from the various town-councils included in the several districts. The county constituencies, on the other hand, who elected the thirty county members, did not exceed fifteen hundred or two thousand persons for all Scotland. Accordingly, Government, through Dundas, had only to deal directly with an upper two thousand or so, including the town-councils,—a body not too large, as Lord Cockburn says, to be held completely within Government’s hand. Gratitude for places conferred, fear of removal from place, and hope of places to be obtained for themselves and their relations or dependents, were the forces by which they were held. Nobody could get a place or could hold a place except through Harry Dundas; and he had places enough at his disposal to give all the necessary chance. There was, first, all the patronage of Scotland itself, including judgeships, sheriffships, professorships, clerical livings, offices of customs and excise, and a host of minor appointments, all within the control of Dundas, to be distributed by him according to his personal knowledge, or the representations of his friends. Then there were commissions in the army and navy, appointments in the India service, medical appointments, and posts in the various departments of the public service in England,—all excellent as openings for young Scotsmen who could not be provided for at home, and in the patronage of which Dundas had his full share by official right or as a member of the general Ministry. The political faith of Scotland was, therefore, simply Dundasism; and it was in a great measure the result of Dundas’s own political position that this Dundasism was equivalent to Toryism. As the colleague and friend of Pitt, the member of a government whose main feeling was hatred to the French Revolution, and to everything at home that savoured of sympathy with that Revolution, Dundas willed that his subjects should be Tories; and they were. At last Toryism became the ingrained national habit. Lord Cockburn describes feelingly the utter political abjectness of Scotland during the Dundas reign. As in England, so in Scotland, “everything rung and was connected with the Revolution in France; everything, not this or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event.” But in Scotland, more than in England, horror of the French Revolution and of every doctrine or practice that could be charged with the remotest suspicion of connection with it, became the necessary creed of personal safety. To resent every idea of innovation or of popular power,—nay, every recognition of the existence of the people politically,—as blasphemy, Jacobinism, and incipient treason, was the same thing as allegiance to Dundas; and this, again, was the same thing as having any comfort in life. Hence, three-fourths of the entire population, and almost all the wealth and rank of the country, were of the Tory party; and no names of abuse were hard enough, no persecution was harsh enough, for the daring men, consisting perhaps of about a fourth of the middle and working classes, with a sprinkling of persons of a higher grade, who formed the small Opposition. Though the opinions of these were of the most moderate shade of what would now be called “liberalism,” the slightest expression of them was attended with positive risk. Spies were employed to watch such of them as had any social position; in several cases there were trials for sedition, with sentences of transportation; and only the impossibility of finding grounds for indictment prevented more. The negative punishment of exclusion from office, and from every favour of Government and its supporters, was the least; and it was universally applied. Burns nearly lost his excisemanship for too free speaking; and a letter is extant, addressed by him to one of the commissioners of the Scottish Board of Excise, in which, without denying his Liberalism, he protests that it is within the bounds of devout attachment to the Constitution, and implores the commissioner, as “a husband and a father” himself, not to be instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his little ones, “into the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the poet’s crime seems to have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh Liberal paper which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This Johnstone was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the very printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by his connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the Dundas reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as late as 1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting on the Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in Edinburgh. Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs or for counties, in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted quietly, by those whose business it was, in town-halls or in the private rooms of hotels; and the people knew of the matter only by the ringing of a bell, or by some other casual method of announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to Dundas and the existing order of things, pervaded every department and every corner of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church, the Bench, the Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any elements of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure of organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of imperturbable political stagnation.
Once, indeed, a crisis occurred which put the Scottish people nearly out in their calculations. This was in March 1801, when Pitt resigned office, and Dundas along with him, and a new ministry was formed under Pitt’s temporary substitute, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth. Dundas out of power was a conception totally new to the Scottish mind,—an association, or rather a dissociation, of ideas utterly paralysing. “For a while,” says Lord Brougham, “all was uncertainty and consternation; all were seen fluttering about like birds in an eclipse or a thunderstorm; no man could tell whom he might trust; nay, worse still, no man could tell of whom he might ask anything.” Dundasism, which had hitherto meant participation in place and patronage, now seemed in danger of losing that meaning; and the bulk of the Scottish population feared that they might have to choose between the name and the thing. They were faithful to Dundas, however; and they were rewarded. The Addington ministry, which had come into power principally to conclude peace with France by the Treaty of Amiens, came to an end after that Treaty had been rendered nugatory by the recommencement of the war; and in May 1804 Pitt returned to the helm. Dundas, who had in the interim been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount Melville, then resumed his place in his friend’s cabinet, to yield his Parliamentary service thenceforward in the Upper House, and official service mainly in the First Lordship of the Admiralty. Scotland then rolled herself up comfortably once more for her accustomed slumber,—the only difference being that her bedside guardian had to be thought of no longer as her Harry Dundas, but less familiarly now as her Lord Melville. So for another year; but then what a reawakening! It was in April 1805 that, in consequence of the report of a Committee of the House of Commons that had been appointed for the investigation of alleged abuses in the naval service, the Whigs, through Mr. Whitbread as their spokesman, opened an attack on Lord Melville on charges of malversation of office, and misappropriation of public moneys, during his former Treasurership of the Navy, either directly, or by collusion with his principal financial subordinate. The attack grew fiercer and fiercer, as well as more extensive in its scope; and, although it was evidently inspired mainly by the political vindictiveness of a party made furious by long exclusion from office, it became more formidable from the fact that some of Pitt’s own friends either abetted it fully or thought that the irregularities in account-keeping which had been disclosed ought not to pass without Parliamentary censure. Pitt reeled under such a blow at once to his private feelings and his administration; and, after doing his best to resist, he had to consent that Lord Melville should quit office, and that Lord Melville’s name should be struck off from the list of His Majesty’s Privy Council till the charges against him were formally and publicly tried. The trial was to be in the shape of an impeachment before the House of Lords. Before it could come on Pitt was dead. He died on the 23d of January 1806; and the longexcluded Whigs had then their turn of power for somewhat more than a year in what is remembered as the Fox and Grenville ministry,—a name accurate only till the 13th of September 1806, when Fox followed his great rival to the grave, and Lord Grenville became Premier singly. It was in April and May 1806, when this Fox and Grenville ministry was new in office, that the great trial of Lord Melville in Westminster Hall was begun and concluded. The charges against him had been formulated into ten articles; and he was acquitted upon all the ten,—unanimously on the only one which vitally impeached his personal integrity, by overwhelming majorities on five of the others, and by smaller but still decisive majorities on the remaining four. On the whole, it was a triumphant acquittal; and it was received as such throughout Scotland,—where, at one of the dinners held in honour of the event by the jubilant Scottish Tories, there was sung a famous song beginning with this stanza:—
“Since here we are set in array round the table,
Five hundred good fellows well met in a hall,
Come listen, brave boys, and I’ll sing as I’m able
How innocence triumphed and pride got a fall.
But push round the claret,—
Come, stewards, don’t spare it;
With rapture you’ll drink to the toast that I give:
Here, boys,