He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by the extraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up. The delegates descended to the street in silence,—Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night,—an immense and agitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaring flambeaux of the sheriff's train. Gerrald, who was already under arrest, as he descended, spoke aloud, "Behold the funeral torches of Liberty!"
Skirving and several others were immediately arrested. They were tried in the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer had previously been, to transportation. Their conduct throughout was worthy of their great and holy cause. Gerrald's defence was that of freedom rather than his own. Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully and earnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starving millions of his countrymen. That some idea may be formed of this noble plea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:—
"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understanding for its support, and not to the sword. All systems, whether civil or moral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth and calculated to promote the good of mankind. This will account to us why governments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived the perishable things which despotism has erected. Yes, this will account to us why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away the dissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injury by the adamant of Christianity.
"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.
"Gentlemen, I am in your hands. About my life I feel not the slightest anxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make the sacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of my ashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of my country."
Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformers has given place to another. And now, half a century after William Skirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges, "You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed by the people," the names of these men are once more familiar to British lips. The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving has become history. On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stone of a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs—for which subscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester—was laid with imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill, Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, Joseph Hume, M. P. After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radical closed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald. At the banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over by John Dunlop, Esq., addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie, and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr. The Complete Suffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walked in procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolested the very principles for which the martyrs of the past century had suffered.
The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot fail to awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who has thus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of the oppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannot live forever. Well and truly did George Fox say in his last days,
"The truth is above all."
Will it be said, however, that this tribute comes too late; that it cannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agony of colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves? It is, indeed, a striking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow- man must "walk by faith," sowing his seed in the morning, and in the evening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's good time the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet for others, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavy clusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones of memorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices. We may regret that in this stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker is not always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive the honors of a benefactor. We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblest sacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked, but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hot and dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and the contemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say with the regal voluptuary of old, This also is vanity and a great evil; "for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart wherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God's universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in our nestling-place? Has life's infancy only been provided for, and beyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for the soul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood? Perchance, could we but lift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might see that our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has by no means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty he is cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services in the old. The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,—flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the benefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, in their new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long- forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reach the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of blessing?
The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of all who seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposing its cherished errors. The truths which they told were not believed, and for that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the case that the right word when first uttered is an unpopular and denied one. Hence he who undertakes to tread the thorny pathway of reform—who, smitten with the love of truth and justice, or indignant in view of wrong and insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once into that great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as a war between light and darkness—would do well to count the cost in the outset. If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the general sympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if he can bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all good nature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitude abuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificing efforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood and his best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still hold on his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shall bring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be looked upon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society's interdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can, through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man,—let him gird up his loins and go forward in God's name. He is fitted for his vocation; he has watched all night by his armor. Whatever his trial may be, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it; flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his strait and narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves his contemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages from their gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but one way of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does not like; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wish to hear.