It was not the unhappiness of the peasantry that stirred the democratic heart of Burns. It was ‘man’s inhumanity’ to his fellow-men; the assumption of those belonging to the so-called upper classes that they had a divine right to hold higher positions than the common people, and that the poorer people should be contented in the ‘station to which God had called them,’ that led Burns to write so ably in favour of democracy. He recognised no human right to establish stations to which people were called, and in which they should remain, in spite of their right to fill any positions for which they had proved their fitness. He could not be so irreverent or so unreasonable as to believe God could establish the conditions found all around him, so he claimed the right of every child to full opportunity for its best development, and to rise honourably to any position to which it could attain.
In a letter to Miss Margaret Chalmers, 1788, he wrote: ‘What signify the silly, idle gewgaws of wealth, or the idle trumpery of greatness? When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation of everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy—in the name of common-sense, are they not equals?’
To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: ‘There are few circumstances, relating to the unequal distribution of good things of this life, that give me more vexation (I mean in what I see around me) than the importance the opulent bestow on their trifling family affairs, compared with the very same things on the contracted scale of the cottage. Last afternoon I had the honour to spend an hour or two at a good woman’s fireside, where the planks that composed the floor were decorated with a splendid carpet, and the gay table sparkled with silver and china. ’Tis now about term-day Such experiences added fuel to the divine purpose in his mind to free a large portion of his fellow-countrymen from the bonds that had been bound on their bodies and souls by long years of class presumption and heartless tyranny, which, till Burns attacked them, had grown more unjust and contemptuous as generation succeeded generation. Burns’s reverence for real manhood, a basic principle of true democratic spirit, is shown in the closing verse of his ‘Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson’: Go to your sculptured tombs, ye Great, To John Francis Erskine he wrote, 1793: ‘Burns was a poor man from birth and an exciseman from necessity; but—I will say it—the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... Can I look tamely on and see any machination to wrest from them the birthright of my boys—the little, independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood?... Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed Mob may swell a Nation’s bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court—these are a nation’s strength.’ He wrote the letter, from which this is an extract, because some super-loyalists were trying to undermine his reputation on account of his independence of spirit and his democratic principles, with a view to having him removed from the paltry position he held as an Excise officer. He was proudly, sensitively independent. He inherited his temperamental characteristics from his mother. He was happier defending others than working for himself. Writing to the Earl of Eglintoun, he said: ‘Mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have as much honest pride as to detest.’ Writing to Mr Francis Grose, F.S.A., in 1790, about Professor Dugald Stewart, he said: ‘Mr Stewart’s principal characteristic is your favourite feature—that sterling independence of mind which, though every man’s right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the magnanimity to support.’
In a’ the tinsel trash o’ state!
But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,
Thou man of worth!
And weep the ae best fellow’s fate
E’er lay in earth.