This, however, was but the mere shadow of a controversy; it was merely a possible controversy, strangled in the birth. But some three years after, the parish was agitated by a dire ecclesiastical dispute, which set us all together by the ears. The place had not only its parish church, but also its Gaelic chapel, which, though on the ordinary foundation of a chapel of ease, was endowed, and under the patronage of the crown. It had been built about sixty years previous, by a benevolent proprietor of the lands of Cromarty—"George Ross, the Scotch agent"—whom Junius ironically described as the "trusted friend and worthy confidant of Lord Mansfield;" and who, whatever the satirist may have thought of either, was in reality a man worthy the friendship of the accomplished and philosophic lawyer. Cromarty, originally a Lowland settlement, had had from the Reformation down till the latter quarter of the last century no Gaelic place of worship. On the breaking up of the feudal system, however, the Highlanders began to drop into the place in quest of employment; and George Ross, affected by their uncared-for religious condition, built for them, at his own expense, a chapel, and had influence enough to get an endowment for its minister from the Government. Government retained the patronage in its own hands; and as the Highlanders consisted of but labourers and farm servants, and the workers in a hempen manufactory, and had no manner of influence, their wishes were not always consulted in the choice of a minister. About the time of Mr. Stewart's appointment, through the late Sir Robert Peel, who had courteously yielded to the wishes of the English congregation, the Gaelic people had got a minister presented to them whom they would scarcely have chosen for themselves, but who had, notwithstanding, popular points about him. Though not of high talent, he was frank and genial, and visited often, and conversed much; and at length the Highlanders came to regard him as the very beau-idéal of a minister. He and Mr. Stewart belonged to the antagonist parties in the Church. Mr. Stewart took his place in the old Presbyterian section, under Chalmers and Thomson; while the Gaelic minister held by Drs. Inglis and Cook: and so thoroughly were their respective congregations influenced by their views, that at the Disruption in 1843, while considerably more than nine-tenths of the English-speaking parishioners closed their connexion with the State, and became Free Churchmen, at least an equal proportion of the chapel Highlanders clung to the Establishment. Curiously enough, however, there arose a controversy between the congregations at this time, in which each seemed, in relation to the general question at issue, to take the part proper to the other.
I do not think the English congregation were in any degree jealous of the Gaelic one. The English contained the élite of the place—all its men of property and influence, from its merchants and heritors, down to the humblest of the class that afterwards became its ten-pound franchise-holders; whereas the Gaelic people were, as I have said, simply poor labourers and weavers: and if the sense of superiority did at times show itself on the more potent side, it was only among the lowlier people of the English congregation. When, on a certain occasion, a stranger fell asleep in the middle of one of Mr. Stewart's best sermons, and snored louder than was seemly, an individual beside him was heard muttering, in a low whisper, that the man ought to be sent up to "the Gaelic," for he was not fit to be among them; and there might be a few other similar manifestations; but the parties were not on a sufficiently equal level to enact the part of those rival congregations that are for ever bemoaning the shortcomings each of the other, and that in their days of fasting and humiliation have the sins of their neighbours at least as strongly before them as their own. But if the English congregation were not jealous of the Gaelic one, the Gaelic one, as was perhaps natural in their circumstances, were, I am afraid, jealous of the English: they were poor people, they used sometimes to say, but their souls were as precious as those of richer folk, and they were surely as well entitled to have their just rights as the English people—axioms which, I believe, no one in the other congregation disputed, or even canvassed at all. We were, however, all roused one morning to consider the case, by learning that on the previous day the minister of the Gaelic chapel had petitioned the Presbytery of the district, either to be assigned a parish within the bounds of the parish of Cromarty, or to have the charge erected into a collegiate one, and his half of it, of course, rendered coordinate with Mr. Stewart's.
The English people were at once very angry, and very much alarmed. As the two congregations were scattered all over the same piece of territory, it would be impossible to cut it up into two parishes, without separating between a portion of Mr. Stewart's people and their minister, and making them the parishioners of a man whom they had not yet learned to like; and, on the other hand, by erecting the charge into a collegiate one, the minister whom they had not yet learned to like would acquire as real a jurisdiction over them as that possessed by the minister of their choice. Or—as the case was somewhat quaintly stated by one of themselves—by the one alternative "the Gaelic man would become whole minister to the half of them, and by the other, half minister to the whole of them." And so they determined on making a vigorous resistance. Mr. Stewart himself, too, liked the move of his neighbour the Gaelic minister exceedingly ill. He was not desirous, he said, to have a colleague thrust upon him in his charge, to keep him right on Moderate principles—a benefit for which he had not bargained when he accepted the presentation; nor yet, as the other alternative, did he wish to see his living child, the parish, divided into two, and the half of it given to the strange claimant that was not its parent. There was another account, too, on which he disliked the movement: the two great parties in the Church were equally represented at this time in the Presbytery;—they had their three members apiece; and he, of course, saw that the introduction of the Gaelic minister into it would have the effect of casting the balance in favour of Moderatism. And so, as both minister and people were equally in earnest, counter petitions were soon got up, praying the Presbytery, as a first step in the process, that copies of the Gaelic minister's document should be served upon them. The Presbytery decided, in terms of their prayer, that copies should be served; and the Gaelic minister, on the somewhat extreme ground that the people had no right to appear in the business at all, appealed to the General Assembly. And so the people had next to petition that venerable court in behalf of what they deemed their imperilled rights; while the Gaelic congregation, under the full impression that their overbearing English neighbours were treating them "as if they had no souls," got up a counter petition, virtually to the effect that the parish might be either cut in two, and the half of it given to their minister, or that he might be at least made second minister to every man in it. The minister, however, finding at the General Assembly that the ecclesiastical party on whose support he had relied were opposed in toto to the erection of chapels of ease into regular charges, and that the peculiarities of the case were such as to cut off all chance of his being supported by their opponents, fell from his appeal, and the case was never called in Court. Some of our Cromarty fisher-folk, who were staunch on the English side, though they could not quite see the merits, had rather a different version of the business. "The Gaelic man had no sooner entered the Kirk o' the General Assembly," they said, "than the maister of the Assembly rose, and, speaking very rough, said, 'Ye contrarious rascal, what tak's you here? What are ye aye troubling that decent lad Mr. Stewart for? I'm sure he's no meddling wi' you! Get about your business, ye contrarious rascal!'"
I took an active part in this controversy; wrote petitions and statements for my brother parishioners, with paragraphs for the local newspapers, and a long letter for the Caledonian Mercury, in reply to a tissue of misrepresentation which appeared in that print, from the pen of one of the Gaelic minister's legal agents; and, finally, I replied to a pamphlet by the same hand, which, though miserable as a piece of writing—for it resembled no other composition ever produced, save, mayhap, a very badly-written law paper—contained statements which I deemed it necessary to meet. And such were my first attempts in the rough field of ecclesiastical controversy—a field into which inclination would never have led me, but which has certainly lain very much in my way, and in which I have spent many a laborious hour. My first pieces were rather stiffly written, somewhat on the perilous model of Junius; but as it was hardly possible to write so ill as my opponent, I could appeal to even his friends whether it was quite right of him to call me illiterate and untaught, in prose so much worse than my own. Chiefly by getting the laughers now and then on my side, I succeeded in making him angry; and he replied to my jokes by calling names—a phrase, by the way, which, forgetting his Watts' Hymns, and failing to consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a "shallow, pretending ninny;" an "impudent illiterate lad;" "a fanatic" and a "frantic person;" the "low underling of a faction," and "Peter the Hermit;" and, finally, as the sum-total of the whole he assured me that I stood in his "estimation the most ignoble and despised in the whole range of the human species." This was frightful! but I not only outlived it all, but learned, I fear, after in this way first tasting blood, to experience a rather too keen delight in the anger of an antagonist. I may add, that when, some two or three years after the period of this controversy, the General Assembly admitted what were known as the Parliamentary ministers, and the ministers of chapels of ease, to a seat in the church courts, neither my townsmen nor myself saw aught to challenge in the arrangement. It contained none of the elements which had provoked our hostility in the Cromarty chapel case: it did not make over the people of one minister to the charge of another, whom they would never have chosen for themselves; but, without encroaching on popular rights, equalized, on the Presbyterian scheme, the standing of ministers and the claims of congregations.
The next matter which engaged my townsfolk was a considerably more serious one. When, in 1831, cholera first threatened the shores of Britain, the Bay of Cromarty was appointed by Government one of the quarantine ports; and we became familiar with the sight, at first deemed sufficiently startling, of fleets of vessels lying in the upper roadstead, with the yellow flag waving from their mast-tops. The disease, however, failed to find its way ashore; and, when, in the summer of the following year, it was introduced into the north of Scotland, it went stalking around the town and parish for several months, without visiting either. It greatly more than decimated the villages of Portmahomak and Inver, and bore heavily on the parishes of Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, and Rosemarkie; in fine, the quarantine seaport town that seemed at first to be most in danger from the disease, appeared latterly to be almost the only place of any size in the locality exempted from its ravages. It approached, however, alarmingly near. The opening of the Cromarty Firth is little more than a mile across; a glass of the ordinary power enables one to count every pane in the windows of the dwellings that mottle its northern shore, and to distinguish their inhabitants; and yet among these dwellings cholera was raging; and we could see, in at least one instance, a dead body borne forth by two persons on a hand-barrow, and buried in a neighbouring sand-bank. Stories, too, of the sad fate of individuals with whom the townsfolk were acquainted, and who had resided in well-known localities, told among them with powerful effect. Such was the general panic in the infected places, that the bodies of the dead were no longer carried to the churchyard, but huddled up in solitary holes and corners; and the pictures suggested to the fancy, of familiar faces lying uncoffined in the ground beside some lonely wood, or in some dark morass or heathy moor, were fraught to many with a terror stronger than that of death. We knew that the corpse of a young robust fisherman, who used occasionally to act as one of the Cromarty ferrymen, and with whose appearance, in consequence, every one was familiar, lay festering in a sand-bank; that the iron frame of a brawny blacksmith was decomposing in a mossy hole beside a thorn-bush; that half the inhabitants of the little fishing village of Inver were strewn in shallow furrows along the arid waste which surrounded their dwellings; that houses divested of their tenants, and become foul dens of contagion, had been set on fire and burnt to the ground; and that around the infected fishing-hamlets of Hilton and Balintore the country-people had drawn a sort of barrière sanitaire, and cooped up within the limits of their respective villages the wretched inhabitants. And in the general consternation—a consternation much more extreme than that evinced when the disease actually visited the place—it was asked by the townsfolk whether they ought not so long as the place remained uninfected, to draw a similar cordon round themselves. A public meeting was accordingly held, to deliberate on the best means of shutting themselves in; and at the meeting almost all the adult male inhabitants attended, with the exception of the gentlemen in the commission of the peace, and the town officials, who, though quite prepared to wink hard at our irregularities, failed to see that, on any grounds tenable in the eye of the law, they themselves could take a share in them.
Our meeting at first threatened to be stormy. The extra Liberals, who, in the previous ecclesiastical struggle, had taken part to a man with the Gaelic people, as they did, in the subsequent church controversy, with the Court of Session, began by an attack on the Town Justices. We might all see now, said a Liberal writer lad who addressed us, how little these people were our friends. Now when the place was threatened by the pestilence, they would do nothing for us; they would not even so much as countenance our meeting; we saw there was not one of them present: in short, they cared nothing at all about us, or whether we died or lived. But he and his friends would stand by us to the last; nay, while the magistrates were evidently afraid, with all their wealth, to move in the matter, terrified, no doubt, by the prosecutions for damages which might be instituted against them were they to stop the highways, and turn back travellers, he himself, though far from rich, would be our security against all legal processes whatever. This, of course, was very noble; all the more noble from the circumstance that the speaker could not, as the Gazette informed us, meet his own actual liabilities at the time, and was yet fully prepared, notwithstanding, to meet all our possible ones. Up started, however, almost ere he had done speaking, a friend of the Justices, and made so angry a speech in their defence, that the meeting threatened to fall into two parties, and explode in a squabble. I rose in the extremity, and, though unhappily no orator, addressed my townsfolk in a few homely sentences. Cholera, I reminded them, was too evidently of neither party; and the magistrates were, I was sure, nearly as much frightened as we were. But they really could do nothing for us. In matters of life and death, however, when laws and magistrates failed to protect quiet people, the people were justified in asserting the natural right to protect themselves; and, whatever laws and lawyers might urge to the contrary, that right was now ours. In a neighbouring county, the inhabitants of certain infected villages were already fairly shut up amid their dwellings by the countryfolk around, who could themselves show a clean bill of health; and we, if in the circumstances of these villagers, would very possibly be treated after the same manner. And what remained to us in our actual circumstances was just to anticipate the process of being ourselves bottled in, by bottling the country out. The town, situated on a promontory, and approachable at only a few points, could easily be guarded; and instead of squabbling about the merits of Justices of the Peace—very likely somewhat Conservative in their leanings—or of spirited Reformers who would like very well to be Justices of the Peace also, and would doubtless make very excellent ones, I thought it would be far better for us immediately to form ourselves into a Defence Association, and proceed to regulate our watches and set our guards. My short speech was remarkably well received. There was a poor man immediately beside me, who was in great dread of cholera, and who actually proved one of its first victims in the place—for in little more than a week after he was in his grave—who backed me by an especially vigorous Hear, hear!—and the answering Hear, hears, of the meeting bore down all reply. We accordingly at once formed our Defence Association; and ere midnight our rounds and stations were marked out, and our watches set. All power passed at once out of the hands of the magistrates; but the worthy men themselves said very little about it; and we had the satisfaction of knowing that their families—especially their wives and daughters—were very friendly indeed both to the Association and the temporary suspension of the law, and that, on both their own account and ours, they wished us all manner of success.
We kept guard for several days. All vagabonds and trampers were turned back without remorse; but there was a respectable class of travellers from whom there was less danger to be apprehended; and with these we found it somewhat difficult to deal. I would have admitted them at once; but the majority of the Association demurred;—to do that would be, according to Corporal Trim, to "set one man greatly over the head of another;" and it was ultimately agreed that, instead of at once admitting them, they should be first brought into a wooden building fitted up for the purpose, and thoroughly fumigated with sulphur and chloride of lime. I know not with whom the expedient first originated: it was said to have been suggested by some medical man who knew a great deal about cholera. And though, for my own part, I could not see how the demon of the disease was to be expelled by the steam of a little sulphur and chloride, as the evil spirit in Tobit was expelled by the smoke of the fish's liver, it seemed to satisfy the Association wonderfully well; and a stranger well smoked came to be regarded as safe. There was a day at hand which promised an unusual amount of smoking. The agitation of the Reform Bill had commenced;—a great court of appeal was on that day to hold at Cromarty; and it was known that both a Whig and Tory party from Inverness, in which cholera was raging at the time, would to a certainty attend it. What, it was asked, were we to do with the politicians—the formidable bankers, factors, and lawyers—who would form, we knew, the Inverness cavalcade? Individually, the question seemed to be asked under a sort of foreboding terror, that calculated consequences; but when the Association came to ask it collectively, and to answer it in a body, it was in a bold tone, that set fear at defiance. And so it was resolved, nem. con., that the Inverness politicians should be smoked like the others. My turn to mount guard had come round on the previous night at twelve o'clock; but I had calculated on being off the station ere the Inverness people came up. Unluckily, however, instead of being appointed a simple sentry, I was made officer for the night. It was the duty assigned to me to walk round the several posts, and see that the various sentinels were keeping a smart outlook, which I did very faithfully; but when the term of my watch had expired, I found no relieving officer coming up to take my place. The prudent man appointed on the occasion was, I feared, tiding over the coming difficulty in some quiet corner; but I continued my rounds, maugre the suspicion, in the hope of his appearance. And as I approached one of the most important stations—that on the great highway which connects the town of Cromarty with Kessock Ferry, there was the Whig portion of the Inverness cavalcade just coming up. The newly-appointed sentinel stood aside, to let his officer deal with the Whig gentlemen, as, of course, best became both their quality and his official standing. I would rather have been elsewhere; but I at once brought the procession to a stand. A man of high spirit and influence—a banker, and very much a Whig—at once addressed me with a stern—"By what authority, Sir?" By the authority, I replied, of five hundred able-bodied men in the neighbouring town, associated for the protection of themselves and their families. "Protection against what?" "Protection against the pestilence;—you come from an infected place." "Do you know what you are doing, Sir?" said the banker fiercely. "Yes; doing what the law cannot do for us, but what we have determined to do for ourselves." The banker grew pale with anger; and he was afterwards heard to say, that had he had a pistol at the time, he would have shot upon the spot the man who stopped him; but not having a pistol, he could not shoot me; and so I sent him and his party away under an escort, to be smoked. And as they were somewhat obstreperous by the way, and knocked the hat of one of the guards over his nose, they got, in the fumigating process, as I was sorry to learn, a double portion of the sulphur and the chloride; and came into court, to contend with the Tories, gasping for breath. I was aware I acted on this occasion a very foolish part;—I ought to a certainty to have run away on the approach of the Inverness cavalcade; but the running away would have involved, according to Rochester, an amount of moral courage which I did not possess. I fear, too. I must admit, that the rough tones of the banker's address stirred up what had long lain quietly enough in my veins—some of the wild buccaneering blood of John Feddes and the old seafaring Millers; and so I weakly remained at my post, and did what the Association deemed my duty. I trust the banker did not recognise me, and that now, after the lapse of more than twenty years, he will be inclined to extend to me his forgiveness. I take this late opportunity of humbly begging his pardon, and of assuring him, that at the very time I brought him to bay I was heartily at one with him in his politics. But then my townsfolk, being much frightened, were perfectly impartial in smoking Whigs and Tories all alike; and I could bethink me of no eligible mode of exempting my friends from a process of fumigation which was, I daresay, very unpleasant, and in whose virtues my faith was assuredly not strong.
When engaged, however, in keeping up our cordon with apparent success, cholera entered the place in a way on which it was impossible we could have calculated. A Cromarty fisherman had died of the disease at Wick rather more than a month previous, and the clothes known to have been in contact with the body were burnt by the Wick authorities in the open air. He had, however, a brother on the spot, who had stealthily appropriated some of the better pieces of dress; and these he brought home with him in a chest; though such was the dread with which he regarded them that for more than four weeks he suffered the chest to lie beside him unopened. At length, in an evil hour, the pieces of dress were taken out, and, like the "goodly Babylonish garment" which wrought the destruction of Achan and the discomfiture of the camp, they led, in the first instance, to the death of the poor imprudent fisherman, and to that of not a few of his townsfolk immediately after. He himself was seized by cholera on the following day; in less than two days more he was dead and buried; and the disease went creeping about the streets and lanes for weeks after—here striking down a strong man in the full vigour of middle life—there shortening, apparently by but a few months, the span of some worn-out creature, already on the verge of the grave. The visitation had its wildly picturesque accompaniments. Pitch and tar were kept burning during the night in the openings of the infected lanes; and the unsteady light flickered with ghastly effect on house and wall, and tall chimney-top, and on the flitting figures of the watchers. By day, the frequent coffins, borne to the grave by but a few bearers, and the frequent smoke that rose outside the place from fires kindled to consume the clothes of the infected, had their sad and startling effect; a migration, too, of a considerable portion of the fisher population to the caves of the hill, in which they continued to reside till the disease left the town, formed a striking accompaniment of the visitation; and yet, curiously enough, as the danger seemed to increase the consternation lessened, and there was much less fear among the people when the disease was actually ravaging the place, than when it was merely stalking within sight around it. We soon became familiar, too, with its direst horrors, and even learned to regard them as comparatively ordinary and commonplace. I had read, about two years before, the passage in Southey's "Colloquies," in which Sir Thomas More is made to remark that modern Englishmen have no guarantee whatever, in these latter times, that their shores shall not be visited, as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years—a portion of time which, long as it may seem, compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as possible now as it was in former times; and were it once imported, do you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded population of your metropolis than it did before the fire? What," he adds, "if the sweating sickness, emphatically called the English disease, were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is not as likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth?" And, striking as the passage is, I remembered perusing it with that incredulous feeling, natural to men in a quiet time, which leads them to draw so broad a line between the experience of history, if of a comparatively remote age, or of a distant place, and their own personal experience. In the loose sense of the sophist, it was contrary to my experience that Britain should become the seat of any such fatal and widely-devastating disease as used to ravage it of old. And yet, now that I saw as terrible and unwonted an infliction as either the plague or the sweating sickness decimating our towns and villages, and the terrible scenes described by De Foe and Patrick Walker fully rivalled, the feeling with which I came to regard it was one, not of strangeness, but of familiarity.
When thus unsuccessfully employed in keeping watch and ward against our insidious enemy, the Reform Bill for Scotland passed the House of Lords, and became the law of the land. I had watched with interest the growth of the popular element in the country—had seen it gradually strengthening, from the despotic times of Liverpool and Castlereagh, through the middle period of Canning and Goderich, down till even Wellington and Peel, men of iron as they were, had to yield to the pressure from without, and to repeal first the Test and Corporation Acts, and next to carry, against their own convictions, the great Roman Catholic Emancipation measure. The people, during a season of undisturbed peace, favourable to the growth of opinion, were becoming more decidedly a power in the country than they had ever been before; and of course, as one of the people, and in the belief, too, that the influence of the many would be less selfishly exerted than that of the few, I was pleased that it should be so, and looked forward to better days. For myself personally I expected nothing. I had early come to see that toil, physical or intellectual, was to be my portion throughout life, and that through no possible improvement in the government of the country could I be exempted from labouring for my bread. From State patronage I never expected anything, and I have received from it about as much as I ever expected.
I was employed in labouring pretty hard for my bread one fine evening in the summer of 1830—engaged in hewing with bare breast and arms, in the neighbourhood of the harbour of Cromarty, a large tombstone, which, on the following day, was to be carried across the ferry to a churchyard on the opposite side of the Firth. A group of French fishermen, who had gathered round me, were looking curiously at my mode of working, and, as I thought, somewhat curiously at myself, as if speculating on the physical powers of a man with whom there was at least a possibility of their having one day to deal. They formed part of the crew of one of those powerfully-manned French luggers which visit our northern coasts every year, ostensibly with the design of prosecuting the herring fishery, but which, supported mainly by large Government bounties, and in but small part by their fishing speculations, are in reality kept up by the State as a means of rearing sailors for the French navy. Their lugger—an uncouth-looking vessel, representative rather of the navigation of three centuries ago than of that of the present day—lay stranded in the harbour beside us; and, their work over for the day, they seemed as quiet and silent as the calm evening whose stillness they were enjoying; when the letter-carrier of the place came up to where I was working, and handed me, all damp from the press, a copy of the Inverness Courier, which I owed to the kindness of its editor. I was at once attracted by the heading, in capitals, of his leading article—"Revolution in France—Flight of Charles X."—and pointed it out to the Frenchmen. None of them understood English; but they could here and there catch the meaning of the more important words, and, exclaiming "Révolution en France!!—Fuite de Charles X.!!"—they clustered round it in a state of the extremest excitement, gabbling faster and louder than thrice as many Englishmen could have done in any circumstances. At length, however, their resolution seemed taken: curiously enough, their lugger bore the name of "Charles X.;" and one of them, laying hold of a large lump of chalk, repaired to the vessel's stern, and by covering over the white-lead letters with the chalk, effaced the royal name. Charles was virtually declared by the little bit of France that sailed in the lugger, to be no longer king; and the incident struck me, trivial as it may seem, as significantly illustrative of the extreme slightness of that hold which the rulers of modern France possess on the affections of their people. I returned to my home as the evening darkened, more moved by this unexpected revolution than by any other political event of my time—brimful of hope for the cause of freedom all over the civilized world, and, in especial—misled by a sort of analogical experience—sanguine in my expectations for France. It had had, like our own country, its first stormy revolution, in which its monarch had lost his head; and then its Cromwell, and then its Restoration, and its easy, luxurious king, who, like Charles II., had died in possession of the throne, and who had been succeeded by a weak bigot brother, the very counterpart of James VII. And now, after a comparatively orderly revolution like that of 1688, the bigot had been dethroned, and the head of another branch of the royal family called in to enact the part of William III. The historical parallel seemed complete; and could I doubt that what would next follow would be a long period of progressive improvement, in which the French people would come to enjoy, as entirely as those of Britain, a well-regulated freedom, under which revolutions would be unnecessary, mayhap impossible? Was it not evident, too, that the success of the French in their noble struggle would immediately act with beneficial effect on the popular cause in our own country and everywhere else, and greatly quicken the progress of reform?