ROBERT BURNS & THE IDEAS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION




AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCOTLAND

by Mark Calney

Second Edition, 2000


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The chapter entitled "The Secret History of Britain's Industrial Revolution" is based on the research of Anton Chaitkin, author of Treason in America and co-author of George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography. Many of the references to Leibniz and his influence are gleaned form Philip Valenti’s work, The anti-Newtonian roots of the American Revolution (Executive Intelligence Review, Dec. 1, 1995). Special thanks to Alan Clayton, Peter Kearney and Robert Brown of Glasgow for their help in research. Also thanks to Gabriele Chaitkin, Christine Cullinan, Neil Edmundson, and Katharine Kanter for editing; Lex Pike for his technical assistance on this second edition; and especially my wife Maureen whose efforts made this publication possible.



TABLE OF CONTENTS


Forward

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface

I. Robert Burns, Scotland's National Poet of Liberty

II. The Historic Issues of Burns' Era

III. The Secret History of Britain's Industrial Revolution

IV. Benjamin Franklin in Caledonia

V. The "Heaven-taught Ploughman"

VI. "English Gold Has Been Our Bane"

VII. Burns Versus Scott



Appendix

A. Works of Robert Burns regarding the American Revolution

B. Interview with Lyndon LaRouche: Integrate Scotland into
the 'Productive Triangle'

C. A Proposal for the Economic Development of Scotland

D. A New Bretton Woods

E. Henry C. Carey: The American System vs. the British System


Bibliography

Internet Sites







FORWARD

The thesis we put forward in the present study, is that Robert Burns is, among modern poets, not only one of the very few truly original artists and teachers in a European language, but one of the most principal advocates of the ideas of Man, identified with the American Revolution of 1776.
The main novelty of this study, is that we have set out to show how Robert Burns emerged from a network associated with the person of the American statesman Benjamin Franklin, and how very directly involved was Franklin himself, in the various schemes crowned with success, to build up from nothing, the infrastructure and industry of the British Isles. Far from being the jaded, irresponsible rabble-rouser and womaniser one reads about in English history books, Franklin spearheaded the last serious attempt to bring forth a politically mature population in the British Isles, by leading them to master new technologies and new branches of science.
The study is the work of an American, Mark Calney, of California. It would be wrong, therefore, for us to presume, what may be the constitutional, the political future, of those nations of Scotland, England, Wales, and the north counties of Ireland, which presently form part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. However, we have used the “British”, to refer specifically, to matters pertaining to policies issuing from the institutions of Great Britain, as opposed to interests of Scotland, Ireland, et al. As British policy over the two centuries since the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1800, has been almost without exception, dominated by the rentier-finance interests of the House of Windsor and her allies among the more ancient noble families both on the islands, and broad, the term “British” as used here, is not only historically precise, it is also not necessarily flattering.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

(to be written)





PREFACE

Alan Clayton
Glasgow, October 1995

I was born a British subject, not a British citizen, because of course there is no such thing. To be British, is first and foremost not to belong to a state; but to belong, in a very real sense, to one of the most powerful and wealthy families in all of human history.
As a ‘subject’ of the House of Windsor my younger childhood was spent among the unquestioning conviction and certainty of British identity among family, friends and neighbors. At church, and in our youth organisations, the icons of British identity were cherished and reinforced. We sang Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia, God Save the King and the other imperialist battle hymns with unquestioning fervour and conviction. In Glasgow, in 1941, I can remember late at night in an air raid shelter my grandmother sitting me on her knee and telling me stories of the great Empire on which the sun never set, which would have inevitable and ultimate victory, while outside the Luftwaffe pounded the shipyard, heavy engineering plants and armaments factories of industrial Clydeside.
Industrial Clydeside is now gone of course. A victim of a force in many respects more deadly even than war, the free market economy which sucked investment increasingly away from industries desperately in need of modernisation and research and development facilities, towards currency speculation unrelated to the physical economy. However, they were still there in 1948, when I went in the company of 90 other lads to Norway, with that great British youth organisation, the Boys Brigade. We toured from Stavanger to Bergen with a huge Union flag draped across the bus, and saw no contradiction whatsoever between that and the fact that we were Scots.
It was not many years later, however, that serious doubts first appeared in my mind about the ‘great Empire’, and that was when at the age of sixteen, I joined the Merchant Navy, and almost the first place I arrived in was India. The poverty staggered me; it was far beyond anything we had experienced even in the war years. Even in those early years of Independence, I recall also the poverty of spirit, the colonial cringe that still infected many Indians, and the ‘cap doffing’ attitude of so many people. Remnants of the colonial administration of the Raj still remained, and the arrogant strutting manner and virulent racism of most of them disgusted me. In many ways it was a disorienting experience; because if I were not British, and I was by now, far from sure that I wanted to be, then what on earth was I?
Early on, I turned to the poetry of Robert Burns to see if there was any hope of finding something of national identity and sense of purpose in the works of the poet. We were never taught Burns at school, just as, by and large, we were never taught any Scottish history. I thought of the British Raj, of Earl Mountbatten, and the generations of oligarchs that had looted India remorselessly. The third verse of Burns’ great republican hymn, A Man’s a Man for A’ That came to mind, as I reflected on the arrogant Mountbatten:


Ye see yon birkie ca'd "a lord,"
Wha struts, an' stars, an' a' that?
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that;
For a' that an' a' that;
His ribband, star, an' a' that,
The man o’ independent mind,
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

Later, we sailed to the United States, and what a remarkable experience that was! There was a spirit of optimism and self confidence everywhere. What Burns meant by ‘The man o’ independent mind’ started to form in my own mind as I talked to these Americans, ‘ordinary guys’ as they would describe themselves; they were citizens of a state, not subjects of a king. How I envied them, not only their prosperity, but their republican spirit, their pride in their work and perhaps above all their understanding and love of the nation to which they belonged. Something of the spirit of ’76 was still alive in America then, and how infectious and inspiring it was even to be in its presence. How could I take this spirit to suffering India, I wondered. The words of Burns’ Ode for General Washington’s Birthday expressed it well:

They harp Columbia, let me take!
See gathering thousands, while I sing,
A broken chain exulted bring,
And dash it in a tyrant’s face.

It was to be forty years later, in 1992, before I was to return to America. I went at the invitation of friends, in a mood of expectation and optimism that was to be sorely disappointed. The big houses I remember in northern Virginia were still there, but oh, how dilapidated and run down so many of them looked, some in dire need of a coat of paint. The great steel mills were mainly gone; dereliction of the kind I knew so well in Scotland, was everywhere. And the people, even the body language seemed different, much of the self-assurance had gone. To my astonishment, many people, when they heard my accent, talked affectionately of the Queen, or even ‘Her Majesty’ of ‘our Queen’. How the spirit of those shipyard and steelworkers of 1952 must have cringed! They would never be rude, but Queens and Majesties could never have been part of their thought-processes or their lexicon. I doubt if any of them knew much of Burns, but the words of his poem A Dream would have said it all for them:

For me! Before a monarch’s face,
Ev’n there I winna flatter;
For neither pension, post, nor place,
Am I your humble debtor.

In the last years many Americans have betrayed the revolution by accepting ‘pension, post, and place’ from the House of Windsor and so become its ‘humble debtor.’ Britishness is a state of mind, a world view, and many Americans have become British in every sense. Well we might ask ourselves from where now is the spirit of republican freedom to come? For Mark Calney, it will come from the words and inspiration of such as Robert Burns; and if Scotland is to be truly free it must not only read Burns but look carefully at the ideas and proposals which have been developed in this book, because they are the consequences of thought-processes which can make Scotland truly free. They are due, initially at least, to the American thinker Lyndon LaRouche, a man who knows from bitter experience the words of Burns’ ‘England in thunder calls, The tyrant’s cause is mine.’ Of LaRouche, Burns would gladly have written, ‘Ye know, and maintain the Royalty of Man.’




I. ROBERT BURNS, SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL POET OF LIBERTY


O Thou! who pour'd the patriotic tide,
That stream'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart,
Who dar'd to nobly stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part:
(The patriot's God peculiarly thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)
O never, never Scotia's realm desert;
But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

- Robert Burns
The Cotter's Saturday Night


During the autumn months of 1989, those who brought down the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe, chose the chorus from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, set to Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy, as the hymn of their struggle for freedom. On October 9th of that year, as the East German dictator, Erich Honecker, led the 40th anniversary celebration of socialism in the GDR, thousands of peaceful demonstrators gathered in Leipzig. Snatches of Schiller’s poems adorned their banners and posters. The police and military had received the order to shoot. Fearful that the assembled troops might not hesitate to fire upon a faceless mass, Kurt Mazur, the internationally renown conductor of Leipzig’s famous Gewandhausorchester, courageously stepped forward to place himself at the front of the demonstrators. The troops did not shoot, and exactly one month later, on the 9th of November, the Berlin Wall was opened.
Human history has reached a point of decision. The communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe have fallen. Yet, the Western economic policies of usury, Free Trade, and Malthusianism are hurtling the world towards a general financial collapse and a New Dark Age.
The need to revive study of the classical poets, including the works of Robert Burns, is crucial if human civilisation is to overcome the present crisis. Consider the following:


"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry
reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas
of Man's concern, poetry reminds him of a richness and
diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry
cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which
must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."


These are the words of President John F. Kennedy, on inviting the American poet Robert Frost to speak at his inauguration ceremony in 1961. This echoes Friedrich Schiller, the German poet and contemporary of Robert Burns:


“Poetry is virtually unique in its power to reunify the
soul’s sundered forces, to occupy heart and mind, activity
and wit, reason and the power of imagination in harmonious
alliances, and, as it were, to restore the entire human being
within us.”


During the darkest days of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln would spend many hours reciting and teaching Shakespeare to his Cabinet. Thereby, he educated and instilled in them the history of the relevant ideas, not the whimsy of public opinion, upon which the future of the nation and mankind required.
Since the time of Homer, it has been the great poets who have been the standard bearers in the struggle for Freedom. It has been their mastery of the principles of Beauty which has enabled men and women to fight for the higher good against evil. As Schiller said, "It is beauty, through which one proceeds to freedom."
Robert Burns exemplifies Schiller’s definition of the aspiration to freedom. His poetry and songs are inseparable from the ideas of the American Revolution. Indeed, Burns volunteers himself to be America’s poet in his Ode for General Washington’s Birthday, when he says


‘Tis liberty’s bold note I swell,
Thy harp Columbia, let me take!


There is no one in the English speaking world, and few elsewhere, who have not heard the poetry of Robert Burns. Beethoven, Haydn, and Felix Mendelssohn set Burn's songs to music, while John Keats praised him in verse. Unfortunately, for most Americans and others around the world, their familiarity with Scotia's bard is limited to a hoarse rendering, wetted by champagne, of his most famous composition, "Auld Lang Syne," as the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve.
In Scotland, there has been a concerted effort to de-politicise and romanticise the works of Burns. In many Scottish colleges, Burns has been dropped from the cirriculum. Were you to attend the most posh of the established Burns Suppers, following the toast to Robert Burns, you would be asked to toast the Queen of England!
For those Scots concerned with the Dignity of Man, the ideas embodied in the works of Robert Burns are a central concern.




II. THE HISTORIC ISSUES OF BURNS' ERA


O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

- Robert Burns
To a Louse


The emergence of Burns as Scotland's leading poet was the result of international developments around the American Revolution. The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed the struggle of a trans-oceanic republican movement determined to overthrow the tyranny of the oligarchical system, and usher in what Friedrich Schiller called the “Age of Reason.”


Oligarchy vs. Republican Systems


Born, like Robert Burns in 1759, Friedrich Schiller defined this conflict most succinctly in his lecture entitled The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon. Schiller saw history as a conflict between two opposing philosophies of law, the one exemplified by the republican reforms of Solon of Athens, and the other, the oligarchical system of Lycurgus, the mythical founder of Sparta. These two opposing systems are irreconcilable
In the oligarchical system, the idea of the State is identical with that of the empire. This is true not only for Sparta, but for its predecessors such as the Assyrian Empire, Babylon, Persia, and the later Roman, Byzantium, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, and British Empires. An elite holds sway over its subjects, deliberately kept in a state of backwardness. The elite claims for itself the right to plunder this population through the mechanisms of usury. The oligarchical view of Man is that he is a beast, and the world a series of great cycles of birth and death, of construction and destruction. Death and destruction are considered to have a “purifying” effect, killing off the weak and enabling the strong to survive. There is no place in this system for scientific and technological progress; indeed, such progress is viewed as the real enemy threatening the eternal cycle.



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THE LEGISLATION OF LYCURGUS AND SOLON

It was beautiful and fitting of Solon, that he had respect for human nature, and never sacrificed people to the state, never the end to the means, but rather let the state serve the people. His laws were loose bonds in which the minds of the citizens moved freely and easily in all directions, and never perceived that the bonds were directing them; the laws of Lycurgus were iron chains in which bold courage chafed itself bloody, which pulled down the mind by their pressing weight. All possible paths were opened by the Athenian legislator to the genius and diligence of his citizens; the Spartan legislator walled off all of his citizens' potentials, except one; political service. Lycurgus decreed indolence by law, Solon punished it severely. In Athens, therefore, all virtues matured, industry and art flourished, the blessings of diligence abounded, all fields of knowledge were cultivated. Where in Sparta does one find a Socrates, a Thucydides, a Sophocles, and Plato? Sparta was capable of producing only rulers and warriors — no artists, no poets, no thinkers, no world-citizens. Both Solon and Lycurgus were great men, both were righteous men, but how different were their effects, since they proceeded from principles diametrically opposed. The Athenian legislator is surrounded by freedom and joy, diligence and superfluidity — surrounded by all the arts and virtues, all the graces and muses, who look up to him in gratitude, and call him father and creator. About Lycurgus, one sees nothing but tyranny and its horrible partner, slavery, which shakes its chains, and flees the cause of its misery.

- Friedrich Schiller,
from The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon

_


This corresponds to a concept of Man as incapable of change, whose "nature" is fundamentally inclined towards evil. Hence, the rule of certain men over their fellows is derived not from the ability of an elite to force through its will. Law has no objective basis in this system.
In a republic, all individuals are endowed with equal, inalienable rights founded upon natural law. The state is not an instrument of power, but rather serves to allow the creative powers of each of its citizens to unfold. As citizens, they are concerned with development of the state as a whole (this idea is reflected explicitly in the “general Welfare” clause in the preamble of the US Constitution). Science and technological development are inherent to the republican state, which rests upon the notion of Man as "imago Dei", i.e. Man created in the image of God.


Venice Invades England


The model for the British Empire was Venice . Benjamin Disraeli, the late-nineteenth-century Prime Minister of Britain, bluntly put it in his novel Coningsby:


"The great object of Whig leaders in England from the
first movement under Hampden to the last most
successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a
high aristocratic republic on the model of Venice...
William the Third told...Whig leaders, 'I will not be a
doge.'...They brought in a new family on their own
terms. George I was a doge; George II was a
doge...George III tried not to be a doge...He might try to
get rid of the Whig Magnificoes, but he could not rid
himself of the Venetian constitution."


The Venetian takeover of England was a 200-year project beginning with the break of Henry VIII with Rome, and concluding successfully with accession of George I to the throne in 1714.
The English parliamentary system of government was modeled on the Venetian system of a Great Assembly and Senate that controlling the doge. On 1688, England officially became an oligarchy.
The best way to understand the evil of Venice is to look at the great poets' portrayals of her astounding duplicity, such as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, an attack against the Rosicrusian cult of Francesco Zorzi and Venetian takeover of England. This was also the subject of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and particularly Othello, the Moor of Venice. One of the most insightful examinations of the evil method of Venice is seen in Friedrich Schiller's The Ghost-seer, which played and an important role in the education of the famous American statesman and president John Quincy Adams on the method of thinking employed by the European oligarchy.
During the 15th century, when the rulers of Venice saw their power threatened by expanding Dutch trading operations, both the Netherlands and England were targeted for Venetian takeover.
The Venetian Party in the British Isles understood that politics is the battle for the mind. In 1529, Francesco Zorzi, Venetian ambassador to England, created the a Rosicrucian-freemasonic party at the English court, where he remained for the rest of his life; his influence on writers like Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sydney was great.
It was Zorzi, who set forth the arguments for the King’s divorce with Catherine of Aragon, thus sealing the alliance with Venice against Spain.
The second wave of the Venetian assault was launched by Paolo Sarpi. England was set up to become the bastion of the New Age.
Sarpi was the main propagandist against the papacy, when in 1606, there was pronounced a papal interdict against Venice. Francis Bacon, his student, took his method from Sarpi's Arte del Ben Pensare, which asserts that the only way an individual can know anything is through his senses. Thus was the modern school of empiricism launched, leading to the radical nominalism of David Hume.


The Ideas of 1776


On July 4, 1776, as the British Empire was engaged in its ruthless attempt to crush resistance to its dictates, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by the representatives of the thirteen American states. It set forth the circumstances and intent of the new American nation.


"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That
all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
"That to secure these rights, governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just power from
the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new government, laying its foundation on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness."


Given their numerous contacts with Scottish intellectuals, it is highly probably that the drafters of that document, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were not unaware of the Declaration of Arbroath (1320). The similarities are striking, not only in content and form. Where the Declaration of Arbroath, in calling upon Pope John XXII to recognise Scotland's independence from the Kingdom of England, states:


"It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that
we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which
no honest man gives up but with life itself."


The American Declaration of Independence concludes:


"And for the support of this declaration, with a firm
reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we
mutually pledge to each our lives, our fortunes, and our
sacred honor."


Governments are to be based upon Natural Law, upon Reason, a law higher than that of any arbitrary will of man.
Alexander Hamilton, of Scottish descent and one America’s Founding Fathers, declared in 1775:


"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged
for among old parchments, or musty records. They are
written, as with a sun beam in the whole volume of
human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can
never be erased or obscured by mortal power."


The Magna Carta of 1225 is not the predecessor to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. It was above all a real estate contract, dealing with the "property rights" and demands of England's landed nobility . Though that contract may speak of "the honour of God and exaltation of Holy Church", it was neither based upon, nor argued from, the position of Natural Law.
In contrast, the Declaration of Arbroath pays no heed to "Rights of Kings." Let us examine again the most important passage:


"Yet if he (Robert Bruce) should give up what he has
begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to
the King of England of the English, we should exert
ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a
subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some
other man who was well able to defend us our King; for
as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will
we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It
is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we
are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no
honest man gives up but with life itself."


__
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ON THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

1. Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom. It is necessary that practice accompany knowledge.
2. Wisdom is the science of felicity, and is what must be studied above all other things.
3. Felicity is a lasting state of pleasure...
4. Pleasure is a knowledge or feeling of perfection, not only in ourselves, but also in others, for in this way some further perfection is aroused in us.
5. To love is to find pleasure in the perfection of another....
11. One is happy when he loves God, and God, who has done everything perfectly, cannot fail to arrange thus, to elevate created beings to the perfection of which they are capable through union with him, which can subsist only through the spirit....
15. One must hold as certain that the more a mind desires to know order, reason, the beauty of things which God has produced, and the more he is moved to imitate this order in the things which God has left to his direction, the happier he will be.
16. It is most true, as a result, that one cannot know God without loving one's brother, that one cannot have wisdom without having charity (which is the real touchstone of virtue), and that one even advances one's own good in working for that of others: for it is an eternal law of reason and of the harmony of things that the works of each person will follow it. Thus the sovereign wisdom has so well regulated all things that our duty must also be our happiness, that all virtue produces its own reward, and that all crime punishes itself, sooner or later.

- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Felicity

___


Though the document is an argument for the independence of the Kingdom of Scotland, it places the position of Robert Bruce as the "King of the Scots" (not the King of ScotLAND, the real estate) upon a conditional foundation. Indeed, it is a not too veiled threat to Bruce that, were he to take the side of the English against Scots, the latter would "make some other man who was well able to defend us our King." That "some other man" is an allusion to William Wallace, who, as a commoner, had earlier rallied the nation against the invasion of Edward I. The choice of who would rule the Scots had to be based upon that individual's ability to defend an independent Scotland, and his commitment to fight for "truth" and "freedom."
The idea of the "pursuit of happiness," in the Declaration of Independence, comes directly from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the philosophical architects of the American republic, who posed this to contradict Locke's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Where Locke defines happiness as “the utmost pleasure we are capable of,” Leibniz objects:


“I do not know whether the greatest pleasure is
possible. I believe rather that it can grow ad infinitum. . . . I
believe then that happiness is a lasting pleasure; which could
not be so without there being a continual progress to new
pleasures. . . . Happiness is then, so to speak, a road through
pleasures; and pleasure is merely a step and an
advancement towards happiness, the shortest which can be
made according to the present impressions, but not always
the best. The right road may be missed in the desire to follow
the shortest, as the stone which goes straight may encounter
obstacles too soon, which prevent it from advancing quite to
the centre of the earth. This shows that it is the reason and
the will which transport us towards happiness, but that feeling
and desire merely lead us to pleasure. . . .
“True happiness ought always to be the object of our
desires, but there is ground for doubting whether it is. For
often we hardly think of it, and I have remarked here more
than once that the less desire is guided by reason the more it
tends to present pleasure and not to happiness that is to say,
to lasting pleasure. . .” (emphasis and punctuation added).


As the leading scientist and philosopher of his day, Leibniz was well known to republican leaders of the American colonies, like the Winthrops and Mathers, with whom he corresponded. In 1710, Cotton Mather's An Essay Upon the Good, spread Leibniz's notion of the science of happiness throughout America. Benjamin Franklin paid tribute to this book as the single most important influence upon his life.
In an attempt to nullify the influence of Leibniz, the Venetian/British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) begat a host of charlatans: Sir Isaac Newton, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Bertrand Russell. This is why Leibniz is virtually unknown in Scotland today. However, this was not always the case.
Leibniz’s threat to the infant British Empire was not limited to the realm of ideas. The Electress Sophia of Hanover, until her untimely death in June of 1714, was the protector and student of Leibniz. As a result of Leibniz’s historical researches thirteen years earlier, combined with the actions of his allies in England, Sophia had been established as the next in of succession to the British throne.
In order to circumvent the real possibility that Leibniz would become the next Queen’s Prime Minister, London’s Royal Society concocted the “Newton-Leibniz controversy” over priority in who discovered calculus, as a means of defaming and discrediting Leibniz in England. On April 12, 1712, Leibniz was officially condemned as a thief and plagiarist of Sir Isaac Newton, in a Royal Society report authored by Newton himself! This event defined the moral dividing line in science and politics throughout Europe.
Leibniz became clearly identified as the leading adversary of British philosophy. The intellectual leadership of colonial America openly sided with Leibniz against Newton and the British establishment.
When Sophia died on June 8, 1714, and Queen Anne died on August 1, the succession passed to Sophia’s anti-Leibniz son, George Louis, a long-time paid asset of the imperialist faction. The new King George I refused Leibniz permission to enter England, his ally Robert Harley was arrested, and Jonathan Swift fled to Ireland.
Only with the death of Leibniz on Nov. 14, 1716, did the imperialist faction feel secure in their control over Great Britain. The Scotsman John Ker attempted one final meeting with Leibniz, in a desperate attempt to save the situation. Ker reports:

“I arrived in Hanover in the Month of November 1716,
on the very Day the late famous Monsieur de Leibniz died,
which plunged me into so much Sorrow and Grief, that I
cannot express it. I shall not pretend to give the Character of
this incomparable Senator, for more able Pens have already
made Encominums upon this truly great Man, whose very
meritorious Fame must continue while Learning or the World
endures; . . .
“I must confess it afforded me Matter of strange
Reflection, when I perceived the little Regard that was paid to
his Ashes by the Hanoverians; for he was buried in a few
Days after his Decease more like a Robber than, what he
was, the Ornament of his Country.”


The most active supporter of Leibniz in the American colonies was James Logan (1674-1751), born in Ulster, the son of a Scots Quaker schoolmaster. In 1699, when Logan was selected by William Penn to be his secretary and accompany him to Pennsylvania, he had taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish (he later undertook learning Arabic, Persian, and Syriac at age 70), and had already begun his lifelong studies of mathematics, astronomy, and the physical sciences. With the passing of Penn in 1718 until his death in 1751, Logan was the leading political and intellectual figure of the colony, holding various offices from mayor of Philadelphia, president of the Assembly, Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor. The young Benjamin Franklin, who frequented Logan’s library (with 2,651 volumes, it was the largest in the colonies) and listed him among the members of his Junto association, received his first substantial job for his new printing business from Logan in 1731.
It was during that period, when regular meetings of the Junto met at his home that Logan resolved to write his own refutation of Hobbes, Locke, and Newton. In 1735, he began his work The Duties of Man as they may be Deduced from Nature, which was “lost until 1971, when it was rediscovered amongst a pile of documents bequeathed to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where the 400 page manuscript lies unpublished today.
In that document, Logan echoes Leibniz in his attack against Locke’s denial of the existence of “innate ideas,” reducing morality to the arbitrary rules of the lawgiver. Logan’s thesis is that all morality is naturally “implanted” in human beings, and cites the work of Homer to show that human morality existed before any written laws. He points out “that the most barbarous Nations, as the American Indians, and African Negroes, who more closely pursue Nature, rather exceed in parental affection, than come short of the more civilized matrons. . .” (emphasis added).


Scottish Roots of the American Revolution


When Robert Burns was born in Alloway in 1759, the county of Ayrshire was known as a focus of unrest. A number of Scots played key roles in the creation of the United States of America. This goes back to the late 1600s, with people like Robert Hunter who was born in Ayrshire. Hunter was a poet, playwright, and political satirist. He was appointed Lt. Governor of Virginia by Lord George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney whom Queen Anne had made Governor of same British colony. Hunter later became the Governor of New York. Alexander Spotswood, another pro-republican Scot, became Lt. Governor of Virginia after Hunter. In 1737, Spotswood, then Postmaster General of the American colonies, appointed Benjamin Franklin Deputy Postmaster General in Philadelphia.
James Logan was a frequent correspondent of Governor Hunter and William Burnet, the 1720 successor of Hunter. Logan’s letters reveal that those American leaders were well aware of the political implications of the Newtonian tyranny, including the witchhunt against Leibniz.
In a letter dated Feb. 7, 1727, Logan, outraged over the third edition of Newton’s Principia which had eliminated even the cursory mention of Leibniz’s name as an independent discoverer of the calculus, wrote to Burnet:


“Tis certain the world was obligated only to Leibniz for
the publication of that method, who was so fair as to
communicate it in a great measure to Oldenburg in 1677,
when Sir Isaac was so careful of concealing his, that he
involved it in his Letter of 1676 in strange knotts of Letters,
that all the art & skill of the universe could never Decipher.”


In another letter to Burnet, May 10, 1727, Logan wrote:


“He Newton –ed. is, however, great, but a man, &
when I last saw him in 1724 walking up Crane Court & the
stairs leading to the Society’s Room, he bent under his Load
of years exceeding unlike what they have Represented him
two years after as in Body. ‘Tis but reasonable to expect a
declension elsewhere, so that for his own honour as well as
the Nation’s, to which he has been a very great one, had he &
Queen Anne both been gathered to their Ancestors by the
year 1710, before that fierce, unnatural Dispute broke out
between him and Leibniz, which I always believed, was blown
up by the forces of the society in opposition to the house that
had so long employ’d Leibniz. . .” (emphasis added).


The Newtonian tyranny was also evident in Scotland. Cadwallader Colden, a New Yorker who was a close scientific and political collaborator of Benjamin Franklin’s, had written his own study of the Leibniz-Newton controversy. From one of his colonial correspondents, Alexander Garden of South Carolina, the following:

Nov. 22, 1755: “. . . What you lastly observe about Mr. Leibniz gives me great pleasure, for tho I believe your principles are sufficiently supported by your consequent natural account of Phenomena, yet so great an authority is very agreeable.”
Jan. 10, 1757: “I have just now copied over your very ingenious reflexions in the Newtonian and Leibnizian Controversy to send to the Edinburgh Society. . . .”
April, 15, 1757: “He Dr. Whytt of Edinburgh received your former Letter to me with great joy and satisfaction, but says he is afraid that some of the Socii will (they are all rigid and literal Newtonians) have their objections. He was to read it before them at first meeting. I have sent him your observations on the Leibnizian Controversy."

James Alexander, an heir to the Scottish earldom of Stirling, was deported to the American colonies for his role in the 1715 rebellion. He became a protégé of Robert Hunter, who knew his family in Scotland. Alexander became a well known astronomer; he was a member of Benjamin Franklin's Philosophical Society, the first organization which established a form of union between the various American colonies. Alexander's son became a general in the Continental Army during the War for Independence.
After the Scottish uprising of 1715 and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the savage occupation policies of the English drove many Scots and their families to the American colonies. The family of John Marshall, the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and Admiral John Paul Jones , the naval hero of the American Revolution, are but two examples.




III. THE SECRET HISTORY OF BRITAIN'S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

I’m now arrived - thanks to the gods! -
Thro’ pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin roads
Is no this people’s study:
Altho’ I’m not wi’ Scripture cram’d,
I’m sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,
Unless they mend their ways.

- Robert Burns
Epigram on Rough Roads


Two centuries ago, there were no "industrial nations" on this planet. England, for example, had less industry than terribly poor countries do today. The United States of America was a rural backwater. France, the richest country in 1750 was completely stagnant. Nowhere in the world were there any factories in the modern sense, no machines powered by artificial means, no industries run on scientific lines.
The Western powers did not become industrialised gradually over these 200 hundred years. Rather, there were suddenly very distinct bursts of invention, and sharply defined periods of growth. Britain's leap from backwardness into the Industrial Revolution began in the 1760s. In America, the great transformation took place in the 1830s and 1840s, and again to a higher level in the 1870s and 1880s.
Mankind's survival now requires such a great stride. But can it be repeated, and would it be desirable to repeat the process today? These questions are now usually answered in the negative, because the world has accepted a package of lies and historical myths about what caused modern times.
Free Trade and Marxist historians both claim, that when medieval restrictions were lifted, and "capitalists" were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their money, they turned their investment toward the greatest profit; thus; freedom to be selfish caused the new industry to appear!
Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee wrote:


"The essence of the Industrial Revolution
is the substitution of competition for the medieval
regulations which had previously controlled the
production and distribution of wealth. On this
account, this historical theory, is not only one of
the most important facts of English history, but
Europe owes to it the growth of two great
systems of thought — economic science, and its
antithesis, socialism."


But how revolutionary new technology suddenly appeared, supposedly without forethought or strategic purpose, is a mystery for which Free Trade and Communist theorists supply the same silly solution. Adam Smith claimed that various bored, uneducated workers, made the most important inventions to lighten their work. In his Wealth of Nations, Smith tells us:


"In the first fire-engines (steam engine,
Ed.) a boy was constantly employed to open and
shut alternately the communication between the
boiler and cylinder...One of these boys, who
loved to play with his companions, observed that,
by tying a string from the handle of the valve
which opened this communication to another part
of the machine, the valve would open and shut
without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to
divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the
greatest improvements that has been made upon
this machine, since it was first invented, was in
this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted
to save his own labour."


Since such a "discovery" is perfectly accidental to the purpose of the enterprise, the motive for the story is to reinforce the lie told by Free Trade and Communist theorists alike: that national progress can never occur by the design of free men, but only as the chance result of selfishness, or through dictatorship.
In Capital, Marx quotes from the spokesman for the British East India Company (and student of Jeremy Bentham) John Stuart Mill:


"It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions
yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human
being."


Marx tells us that the aim of capitalist application of machinery is only to reduce the workers' share of the pie. The attacks we witness today by the media and radical environmentalists against industrial development, echo the Communist Manifesto:


"The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever
more rapidly developing, makes workers livelihood more
and more precarious."


But the secret to modern history, is that all the great breakthroughs in technology and living standards were conscious schemes to better the lot of humanity, guided by the principles in the American Declaration of Independence.


Prometheus of the 18th Century


There is one individual who should be credited with organising the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin, known as the "Prometheus of the 18th century." He was the father of electricity, and the leading scientific figure of his day. To him, Beethoven dedicated his 9th Symphony.
Franklin organised the international conspiracy of scientists, artists, and political figures which won the American War of Independence. Similar republican movements were to come to power throughout the world. It was also Benjamin Franklin who organised the industrial revolution in the British Isles. This included the steam engine project and the work of James Watt, as well as setting up in Scotland what become Europe's largest iron works.
Benjamin Franklin's Scottish friends played a crucial role in Robert Burns' career, in particular, Rev. Dr. Thomas Blacklock, the blind scholar of Edinburgh.
In 1786, Burns' first collection of poems was published in a limited, local edition, commonly referred to as the "Kilmarnoch Edition" (Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect). If not for the intervention of Dr. Blacklock, Robert Burns might well have become the national poet of Jamaica, and not of Scotland. Plagued by personal problems, Burns had decided to escape his troubles by sailing for the West Indies. As Burns later wrote:


"I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my
chest was on the road to Greenoch; I had composed my
last song I should ever measure in Caledonia...when a
letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all
my schemes by rousing my poetic ambition. The Doctor
belonged to a set of Critics for whose applause I had
not even dared to hope. His idea that I would meet with
every encouragement for a second edition fired me so
much that away I posted to Edinburgh without a single
acquaintance in Town."


It was Blacklock's bigger plan to bring out a second edition of his poetry, that kept the Bard in Scotland.


The Old Man, in Person


In the spring of 1757, Dr. Franklin sailed to England for his second visit, as the official representative of the colony of Pennsylvania. His achievements, by that time, had included:

• The founding of the Philosophical Society, the first organisation uniting the American colonies. Subcommittees of the Society were then planning to set up native industries, illegal under the latest repressive colonial statutes.

• His published scientific experiments had elucidated the nature of electricity.

• As colonial Postmaster, he had established regular communication within America. Inexpensive newspapers, including Franklin's own publications, brought up-to-date intelligence to the colonialists.

• He had established and trained the Pennsylvania militia, and had helped Col. George Washington to stop terrorism along the Western border.

Corresponding with a worldwide circle of scientists and intellectuals, Franklin was chief of intelligence for the American nation about to be born.
When Franklin arrived in the British Isles, they were very backward. There were virtually no roads between cities, no canals, and no railroads. Iron, cloth, or grain could not be shipped overland except in the saddlebags of a packhorse, and only when the mud was down. All manufacturing was done on a small scale by local operatives or in rural dwellings. London had great wealth from world trade and finance, but it was the capital of an undeveloped country.
The project to industrialise Great Britain began shortly after Franklin's arrival, among a small circle of his political and scientific collaborators.
Though its results were to be of great benefit to the general population, the project was at times subject to harassment. It was therefore carried out with prudence and sometimes secrecy.
One of Benjamin Franklin's associates was the fellow printer and type designer, John Baskerville, who in 1757 had published a handsome edition of Virgil, to which Franklin had subscribed. In 1758, Baskerville was appointed printer to Cambridge University. That year Franklin attended the commencement exercises.
Franklin then travelled to the city of Birmingham, meeting with Baskerville and his own family relations. He also carried a letter from John Mitchell, a pioneer seismologist, astronomer, and magnetic scientist, who was also Professor of Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge. Mitchell's letter was to Matthew Boulton, Jr., son of a buckle and button manufacturer:


"to introduce...the best Philosopher of America, whom
you are already very well acquainted with though you
don't know personally."


No later than the summer of 1758, Franklin and Matthew Boulton, Jr. began work on electricity, metallurgy, and the harnessing of steam power. Their collaboration, at times surreptitious and subject to police surveillance, continued until Franklin's death in 1790.
Franklin became tutor, science advisor and political counsellor to Boulton's closest friends, including the potter, Josiah Wedgewood, and Boulton's personal physician, Erasmus Darwin. Along the line of Franklin's secret society, the Junto of Philadelphia, the Birmingham group became known as the Lunar Society. It was become most influential.


The Manchester Project


John Gilbert, a former apprentice in the shop of Matthew Boulton, Sr., was employed in 1757 as the manager of the Bridgewater lands and coal mines at Worsley. His brother, Thomas Gilbert, was estate manager for the Bridgewater and Gower families.
During 1757, the 21 year-old Francis Egerton, Third Duke of Bridgewater, came into possession of his inheritance, notably lands in London, and the Worsley estate located in an agricultural area 10 miles west of Manchester.
John Gilbert turned the perennial problem of mine flooding into a technologically unprecedented aid to navigation. He proposed digging an underground canal in the mine itself, straight through the side of a hill. In this way, newly-mined coal could be loaded directly onto barges, and the drainage from the mine would serve to maintain water levels in the canal on its course overland towards Manchester.
At the time, there were little more than 6,000 houses in Manchester. No factories using coal for steam power existed. Wood was the fuel for hearth fires throughout England. Thus, there was no market whose “logic” Bridgewater was obeying, when he decided to pursue the project. There were also no other canals in England.
Excited by Gilbert's proposal, the Third Duke of Bridgewater devoted his life to the construction of canals. Secret preparation began; land in and around Manchester was bought up.
Finally, an act was put through Parliament, giving the Duke the right to compel landowners along the route to sell him their property. The act stipulated that, for the next 40 years, the coal delivered from the Worsley mines would cost at no more than 4 shillings per hundredweight, compared to the pre-canal average price of 7 or 8 shillings. Freight tolls were to be kept at a fixed limit, and manure was to be toll-free.
The Duke was not a "capitalist", but a heavily encumbered landowner. He exhausted his personal funds early on. The Gilbert brothers issued very small denomination bonds, which were sold to local merchants; the Duke borrowed from his tenants. There was no backing from London banks, and no net profit in the enterprise for the first 15 years.
The Duke paid fair prices to displaced landowners. He hired more and more coal miners, paid them good wages, and secured decent living conditions for his workers in new cottages.
The Bridgewater canal was begun in 1759, and included a graceful aqueduct.
It was completed in 1761. Thousands of people began moving into the city and starting families there, as there was a secure supply of cheap Worsley coal for heating. There were well-paid jobs; with a new labour supply and cheap fuel, a quantity of new manufacturers was set up. A greatly expanded canal system, and steam-powered machinery, would soon complete the amazing, virtually overnight emergence of an industrial centre.
By 1790, workmen from the new textile mills could be seen walking Manchester's streets, with five-pound notes protruding from their hats. Yet 50 years later, the city had become notorious for the horrible poverty and cruelty in its mills, and for the so-called Manchester School of economic thought, which claimed that the unrestricted freedom to do ill to one's neighbor was the cause of England's technological development.
The Gilbert brothers had employed one James Brindley as chief consulting engineer, to work under the supervision of John Gilbert. Historians have described Brindley as author, designer, and manager of the canal projects, when he was not even the chief engineer, while the Duke of Bridgewater was written off as a venturer of capital, and John Gilbert blacked out. Thus, the project's purpose ﷓﷓ to transform a backward country ﷓﷓ has been kept from public view.
Matthew Boulton, Jr., after inheriting his father's buckle-making shop in 1759, built England's first great manufacturing plant, the Soho works outside Birmingham, powered at first by a water wheel.
After the success of the Bridgewater canal, a partnership of the Duke, the Gilbert brothers, Josiah Wedgewood, Erasmus Darwin, and Matthew Boulton was formed to extend the canal from Manchester to the port of Liverpool, and then to connect Hull, Bristol, and London.
Thomas Bentley, a classical scholar who was Wedgewood's business partner, and Erasmus Darwin wrote pamphlets and letters to broaden the vision of the British people.
Wedgewood and John Gilbert coordinated negotiations with Liverpool merchants. Thomas Gilbert entered the House of Commons in 1763, adding to the political force of Bridgewater and Leveson-Gower in the House of Lords.
On May 22, 1765, as the group feverishly negotiated, planned, and lobbied for the expanded canal company, Benjamin Franklin launched a new project.
From London, Franklin wrote to Boulton:


"To introduce my friend Doctor Small to your
acquaintance...an ingenious philosopher and a most
worthy honest man" and to ask, "if any thing new in
magnetism or electricity or any other branch of natural
knowledge has occurred to your fruitful genius since I
last had the pleasure of seeing you, you will by
communicating it, greatly oblige."


Dr. William Small, a native Scot, had emigrated to Virginia in 1758 to teach science and mathematics at William and Mary College in Virginia, where many future leaders of the American republic were being trained. Dr. Small and the law professor George Wythe, their mutual student Thomas Jefferson, and Governor Francis Faquier often formed a string quartet.
When an anti-republican administration took over of the college, Small returned to England with Franklin in 1764. The following year, Small accepted the Old Man's assignment coordinate the development of a practical steam engine.
On Franklin's recommendation, Matthew Boulton accepted William Small as his personal physician and industrial manager. The pace of activity at the Soho plant increased forthwith.
The canal partnership with the Duke was formalized in July 1765. Early the next year, a bill authorising the cutting of the canal to Liverpool was being steered through Parliament, towards a Commons committee whose chairman was Thomas Gilbert.
In February 1766, Franklin testified to Parliament against the Stamp Act. He warned that the British Empire would fall unless it ceased to loot the colonies.
On February 22, 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. On the same day Matthew Boulton wrote Franklin in London:


"The addition you have made to my happiness in
being the cause of my acquaintance with the amiable
and ingenious Dr. Small deserves more than thanks...I
introduce to you my good friend Mr. Samuel Garbett...a
zealous advocate for Truth & for the rights of your
oppressed Countrymen...My engagements since
Christmas have not permitted me to make any further
progress with my fire-engines....Query, ﷓﷓ which of the
steam valves do you like best? Is it better to introduce
the jet of cold water at the bottom of the receiver...or at
the top? Each has its advantages and
disadvantages...if any thought occurs to your fertile
genius which you think may be useful, or preserve me
from error in the execution of this engine, you'll be so
kind as to communicate it to me..."


Boulton and Small had built a model steam engine. It was then in Franklin's hands in London, and was attracting more and more attention.
Samuel Garbett was to play an important role on the Scottish flank of Franklin's industrialisation plan.
Though certain primitive steam engine-type devices were already in use, involving hot water vapor, such as the Newcomen engine, Franklin made various suggestions to burn the fuel more efficiently. This problem was finally solved at Soho.
Having won over Parliament, Boulton, the Gilberts, and the Duke initiated canal projects all over England. James Brindley was often the engineer.
Soon "canal mania" changed the face of the island; Great Britain took to the use of coal for fuel from distant mines, instead of cutting down local timber stands. The mass manufacture of iron and steel was now practicable.


James Watt


In 1767, the Scottish mechanic-engineer James Watt went to visit the Soho works and met there with the manager, Dr. William Small. They talked of Watt's own recent experiments with steam power in Scotland, in partnership with the chemist Dr. John Roebuck in Scotland.
Dr. Small wrote to Watt, January 7, 1768, proposing the creation of a new firm:


"...you should settle here, and Boulton and I
assist you as much as we could...I have no kind of
doubt of your success, nor of your acquiring fortune, if
you proceed upon a proper plan as to the manner of
doing business; which, if you do, you will be the sole
possessor of the affair even after your patent has
expired...I should not hesitate to employ any sum of
money I can command on your scheme...Boulton and I
would engage...provided you will live here."


James Watt, though making scientific instruments for the faculty at Glasgow University, was a zealous student of music. He learned to repair violins, flutes, and guitars. He studied harmonic theory, and in building a full-scale organ, he devised new means of regulating the stops, the tuning, and the air pressure of the instrument.
Watt then studied the available French and Italian literature on steam research; he conducted rigorous experiments on gas dynamics.
While repairing a broken Newcomen engine, he conceived the separate condenser, the eventual basis of a practical steam engine. He led the steam away from the main cylinder, liquefied it with a cold jet, reheated and brought it back into action; the cylinder remained hot and thus did more work with less fuel.
In negotiations to set up the world's first steam engine business, William Small prepared a patent for Watt, tentatively approved on January 6, 1769.
With constant encouragement by Dr. Small, Watt finally moved to Birmingham in 1774; the partnership of Small, Boulton, and Watt, under Small's patient and scientific management, pressed on and completed their first successful machine late that year.
The Soho group invested perhaps £50,000 there, with no real profits until the 1780s.
The Soho steam engine became the driving force for the industrial revolution after a last, crucial improvement was made. At first, the piston was packed with stuffing material, to close the gap with the cylinder wall and prevent the loss of steam pressure and force. The cast iron cylinder could never be shaped evenly enough for a tight fit around the piston. Boulton proposed to iron master John Wilkerson that his machine tool for boring out cannons be modified to produce an engine cylinder.
Wilkinson's cylinder borer succeeded brilliantly, and Soho now made powerful, efficient steam engines, which Wilkinson used to run his furnace bellows, and to turn his machines. Here was the birth of many industries at once. Wilkinson produced all the tools and machine parts for Soho, and Wilkinson and Boulton jointly launched modern English copper mining. Mary Wilkinson, his daughter, married Joseph Priestly.


End of the Republican Enterprise


The firm of “Small, Boulton, and Watt” was incorporated in 1774, as the American Continental Congress first met. War approached. The cry of “treason" was raised those who were known to be friendly towards the colonies; mob violence and prosecution threatened them.
On February 25, 1775, at the age of 41, William Small suddenly died. No one bothered to assign a cause of death, and in a climate of fear, his body was thrown into an unmarked grave.
After Small's death, the Birmingham group was re-organised into a more clandestine association known as the Lunar Society; Benjamin Franklin’s close friend Joseph Priestly (the discoverer of “air” and carbon dioxide) would ever speak openly about it, many years later.
Major John Cartwright, founded The Society for Constitutional Information in 1784. Cartwright had refused a commission to fight the Americans, declaring that as human rights come from God, they cannot be taken away by man. Later, between 1812 and 1815, he toured Scotland, establishing the pro-republican Hampden Clubs (named after the John Hampden, Parliamentary hero of the English Civil War period). His brother Edmund Cartwright, a republican clergyman, invented the power loom in 1784, and applied Boulton and Watt engines for the first time to textile manufacturing.
Boulton and Watt toured France in 1787 as guests of the government. Wilkinson was now supplying the French with cannons and other vital military equipment.
By 1791, the party of Lord Shelburne had mounted a counterattack against the republican movement. The slogan was "down with the French Revolutionists." On July 14, 1791, as an officially sanctioned "rioting mob" sacked and burned Joseph Priestly's home and laboratory, and two churches where he preached. Troops lead by Shelburne's Scottish lieutenant, Henry Dundas, marched into Birmingham to "restore order." Priestly fled to America. After the so-called riot, Watt attended the next Lunar Society meeting toting a pistol. But the Society was crushed and had to be disbanded. Cartwright, Thomas Paine, and others fled to France.
Thus, a project for science and industry, which might have been extended to develop the entire world in short order, was aborted in England. The enterprises begun in the 1760s and 1770s had created such immense public wealth that they could only be checked, not erased. Aside from her role in the applying steam power to rail transport, Great Britain would never again introduce strategically important technology to the world.




IV. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN CALEDONIA


"On the whole, I must say, I think the time we spent
there, was six weeks of the dearest happiness I have met
with in any part of my life; and the agreeable and instructive
society we found there in such plenty, has left so pleasing
an impression on my memory, that did not strong
connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would
be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of
my days in."

﷓ Letter from Benjamin Franklin to
Lord Kames, January 3, 1760


Unfortunately, much of Franklin's Scottish papers vanished with his trunks deposited at the Galloway residence in Trevose, Pennsylvania. The house was looted by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, just as the English removed Scottish state documents after the invasions in the late 13th century and early 14th century, and under Cromwell. However, there is much that we do know about Franklin's Scottish connections.
In the summer of 1759, Benjamin Franklin, then Agent for the Province of Pennsylvania and in his 54th year, left his lodging at No. 7 Craven Street in London on his way to Scotland.
He and his son William had moved to Craven Street shortly after they arrived at Falmouth in 1757. Benjamin remained there until his departure for Philadelphia in 1761. He returned in December 1764 and stayed until 1775.
Franklin's trips to Scotland were not holiday excursions. The aim was intelligence, recruiting, and organising.
Franklin's Scottish relations go back to his early days in Philadelphia. Many of the Scots he had known in America included Andrew Hamilton, who designed the Pennsylvania State House, James Burd the Indian fighter from Tinian near Susquehanna, Professor Alexander Alexander from the faculty of the college of Fourth Street, Barclay of Urie, Comptroller of the Port of Philadelphia, and Thomas Greame the Aberdonian who had been one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society. Then there was Davey Hall ("Edinburgh Davey") who had come over to Philadelphia in 1744 and had become Franklin's partner in 1748. Davey had previously been employed at William Strahan's printing shop in London.
The average Englishman of that period thought of the Scots as a race of impecunious adventurers who had swarmed into London to engross positions and achieve careers at the expense of the native-born. The hatred was so intense that many Scots residing in London anglicised their names; Strachan became Strahan and Menzies became Mengis.
Many of Franklin's closest friends in London were of Scottish origin, such as Caleb Whitefoord, a wine merchant who lived next door on Craven Street. This tie was so well known that in 1782 the British Foreign Office sent Whitefoord as envoy to negotiate a peace settlement with Franklin to end the War of Independence. Whitefoord boasted that his friendship with Franklin had saved a year of warfare.
Other Scottish associates included, John Fothergill, Franklin's physician in London and Sir John Pringle, a close friend and scientist who traveled with Franklin to Germany and France.
William Srathan, an Edinburgh born printer active in London, with whom Franklin corresponded for 20 years, was his banker, adviser, publisher, and guide. He was also David Hume's printer. The American Revolutionary War created a rift between Franklin and Strahan, witnessed by Strahan's remark:


"Look upon your Hands, they are stained with the
blood of your Relations. You and I were friends. You are
now my enemy..."


Though later he corresponded with Franklin when he was American Envoy to France.
Franklin also frequented the London tavern where Scots gathered, the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, run by a Scots-woman, Mrs. Anderson, whose brother was the Bishop of Salisbury . Those whom Franklin meet at the British Coffee House included Rev. William Robertson, later to became the Principal of Edinburgh University, who in the summer of 1759 was working on a manuscript for his The History of Scotland, During the Reign of Queen Mary and of King James VI. It would become the historical reference source for Friedrich Schiller's drama Mary Stuart.
The Scotland tour was the idea of Dr. Patrick Baird of the University of St. Andrews, who had lived in Philadelphia and been a member of Franklin's Junto. Baird had organised the Rector of St. Andrews, David Shaw, to confer upon Franklin an honorary degree in 1759:


"Conferred the Degree in Laws on Mr. Benjamin
Franklin famous for his writings on Electricity and appoint
his diploma to be given him gratis, the Clerk and Arch
Beadle's dues to be paid by the Library Questar."


When Franklin and his son William set out for Scotland on August 8, 1759, the streets of London were filled with people celebrating the news that English and Hanoverian troops had routed the French in the victory at Minden.
Roads to Scotland were narrow clay lanes, impassable after rain. Bridges were precarious, inns wretched, relays uncertain, highwaymen everywhere.
Franklin's journey took him through Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Liverpool, and the Carlisle Road to Edinburgh. He passed through Birmingham, where he met with family relations and visited John Baskerville and Matthew Boulton.
As he progressed, Franklin became aware of the animosity between the Scots and English. He observed that from Lancaster Northward, every tavern window was covered with anti-Scots graffiti; and the same against the English, North of the border.


Auld Reekie: "Athens of the North"


When Benjamin Franklin arrived in Edinburgh in 1759, the population of the city was approximately 50,000 souls.
The Franklins found lodging on Milne Square. Philadelphia, at the time, had cesspools, but not Edinburgh. Apartments used "luggies" to hold human excrement, thrown out through windows onto the streets below at 10 p.m. each evening. The Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson, one of Burns' beloved predecessors, wrote a famous verse about the "gardy loo":


On stair wi tub or pat in hand
The bare﷓foot housemaid loe to stand
That antrin folk may ken how snell
Auld Reekie will at morning smell.
Then with an inundation big as
The burn that 'neath the Nor Loch brig is
They kindly shower Edina's roses
To quicken and regale our noses.


Franklin and William were elevated as Guild Brethren of Edinburgh in a public ceremony on September 5th. Adam Smith was in Edinburgh at the time, and had just published his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He met with the Franklins.
Sir Alexander Dick, President of the College of Physicians, was the first host of Franklin in Edinburgh; he became one of his associates and correspondents. He was to further medical science in America. He took Franklin on a tour of the municipal hospital, many features of which Franklin later incorporated in the Pennsylvania Infirmary.
The road from Edinburgh to Glasgow was a muddy winding trail of 46 miles which took the Franklins 12 hours to travel. In the winter, the same trip could take a day and a half. On the northern horizon of the road, the surveyor's rods marked the site of the new Carron Iron Works, the fledgling industry which was to be closely linked to Franklin's designs for the industrialisation the British Isles.
Glasgow then had 20,000 inhabitants. A thriving shipbuilding industry had started; boats laden with rum from Jamaica and tobacco from Virginia sailed into the Clyde.
The tavern where the Franklins lodged was crowded with Reverends of the Kirk of Scotland, there to attend the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr. The Synod opened a few days after Franklin's arrival, with a sermon entitled "Trial of Religious Truth by Its Moral Influence," delivered by the Moderator, a parson from the Laigh Kirk of Paisley, John Witherspoon, later to become President of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and member of the Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin and Witherspoon would sit together in Philadelphia during the debates which proceeded the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
In Glasgow, Franklin met with Robert Simson, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow (with whom Franklin had earlier corresponded), and Professor John Anderson, who later guided the Americans through the Perthshire. Anderson was of a scientific turn. He was engaged in perfecting a new cannon, in which the recoil was counteracted by the condensation of air. It is also believed that Franklin assisted Professor Anderson to set up a lightning rod on the North College.
Franklin made a walking tour of the quad on High Street, by the University of Glasgow. He visited Alexander Wilson, the father of Scottish type founders who was about to take the chair of Practical Astronomy at the University. Leaving Wilson's shop, he called upon the brothers Andrew and Robert Foulis, the celebrated printers. Like John Baskerville, they specialized in the classics; Franklin obtained a copy of the Foulis Thucydides. The two brothers also established a museum to display the works of Italian and French artists.
On the quad, one door removed from the Foulis workroom laboured a frail, sickly young mechanic, who eked out a living by mending musical instruments, James Watt.


The Founding Father from St. Andrews


St. Andrews lay off the direct road from Perthshire to Edinburgh. The university faculty had conferred their honour upon Franklin in February 1759. In the meantime, he had forwarded the University his book, Experiments and Observations, which lies today in the college library. In a formal ceremony, Benjamin Franklin was made a Guild Brother of the town of St. Andrews.
Among the students who gathered on that October day in 1759 to witness the investiture was James Wilson of Fife. Wilson was also to sign the Declaration of Independence, and was to become one of the keenest legal minds of the new American Republic.
Later a member of the Committee of Detail of the Continental Congress, James Wilson was the principal author of the first draft of the U.S. Constitution. It was he who proposed that the executive branch of government be headed by a single person, to be styled "the President of the United States."
Wilson would also become the first Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; he taught natural law to President George Washington's cabinet. He helped Alexander Hamilton to found the National Bank of the United States.
During his stay in St. Andrews, Franklin saved the life of one of the students, then seriously ill, David Stuart Erskine, Lord Cardross, later Earl of Buchan. As a result, Erskine cultivated an enthusiasm for all things American. In June 1792, during Washington's first term, Lord Buchan sent the President, whom he considered his "cousin," a box made from the wood of an oak tree under which William Wallace is said to have rested after the battle of Falkirk. In his Will, Washington returned the object to its original owner.
The Earl of Buchan also became a friend of Robert Burns. It was the Earl who encouraged Burns to tour Scotland and develop his "Muse of Scottish story and Scottish scenes" , shortly after Burns had decided against exile. In 1791, at the Earl’s behest, Burns composed his Address to the Shade of Thomson, the recently deceased and presented it at a ceremonial inauguration in Ednam of a monument for the poet.
As a result of Franklin's first tour of Scotland, he advised American medical students to attend the University of Edinburgh.
In the spring of 1760, Franklin persuaded John Morgan to study at Edinburgh rather than Leyden, which had hitherto been the prime choice of American and English medical students. Morgan later became the founder of the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin personally sponsored a number of medical students to study at Edinburgh. Many showed their gratitude by dedicating their graduation thesis to him.
During October 1766, two lads from America arrived in London and urged Franklin to sponsor their entry into Edinburgh University. They were Jonathan Potts, son of the founder of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Benjamin Rush. Franklin finally arranged through Principal William Robertson that the two should stay with Dr. Thomas Blacklock. Rush wrote in his autobiography: "At that time I adopted republican principles in the city of Edinburgh."
Benjamin Rush completed his studies at Edinburgh and went to London where he lived with Franklin at Craven Street. Rush was to become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; he became director of the U.S. Mint in 1797. Rush also befriended Thomas Paine, during Paine's stay in Philadelphia in 1774. According to Rush, it was his idea to have Paine write Common Sense and also he who gave the book its title. The book was then published by a Glasgow bookseller settled in Philadelphia, Robert Bell. This book was the spark which touched off popular support for independence among the colonialists.
When the Revolution broke out, all the American graduates of Edinburgh University, except one, enlisted in the patriot army!


Vulcan's Scottish Forge


"We were conducted to the works for melting ore;
where four furnaces, of forty-five feet in height, devoured
both night and day enormous masses of coals and
metals...one doubts whether he is not at the foot of a
volcano in eruption, or whether he has been transported by
some magic spell to the brink of the cavern, where Vulcan
and his Cyclops are busy forging thunderbolts."


This was the observation made by the French scientist Faujas de St. Fond, upon his visit to the Carron Iron Works outside of Falkirk, Scotland in 1784.
Those iron works were the result of the Franklin industrialisation project, overlapping the projects at Birmingham and Manchester. The Carron Iron Works became "the largest and most famous producer of iron and all kinds of iron goods in Europe before the end of the eighteenth century."
In 1771, Benjamin Franklin returned to Scotland, following a short excursion to Ireland, of which he once wrote:


"All Ireland is strongly in favour of the American
cause. They have reason to sympathize with us. I send you
four pamphlets written in Ireland or by Irish gentlemen, in
which you will find some excellent well﷓said things."


En route to Glasgow, during 1771, Franklin's party turned northward near Falkirk. Franklin's immediate interest was a new canal being constructed under the supervision of his friend and correspondent, John Smeaton of Leeds. Smeaton had built the Eddystone lighthouse on the islet of Eddystone in Plymouth Harbor. The Forth Canal was his next project. Joining Franklin on the journey was Henry Merchant, Agent for Rhode Island, later a member of the Committee of Correspondence in Rhode Island and a delegate to the Continental Congress. Merchant described in his journal what the party saw:


"Novr. 6 ﷓ ...Just beyond Falkirk we crossed the
famous Canal now cutting from the Forth which leads from
the open Sea at the East of Scotland by Forth & Edinburgh
to Stirling &c- This Canal begins near the most noted Iron
Works and leads to the River Clyde which from the open
Sea the West Side of Scotland up to Genoch the Seaport for
& near to Glasgow. So that a Communication will be formed
from Sea to Sea by this Canal when finished...Crossing at
the Head of the Works we got out of the Chaise & examined
it for some Distance then went six or seven Locks or gates
for letting in & shutting out the Water the Ground being here
uneven. And at this place the Road is to run under the
Canal."


James Watt tells us that he was engaged in the survey of the Forth and Clyde canal and "leading a life of much vexation and bodily fatigue, of hunger, cold and wet feet." During this time Watt was also acting as engineering advisor of the Carron Works. He alone working on the steam engine project with Dr. John Roebuck. Some of the parts for his steam engine were being cast at Carron.
Dr. John Roebuck, one the founders of the Carron Iron Works, settled in Prestonpans in 1749. He applied his knowledge of chemistry to the manufacture of sulphuric acid, and undertook a partnership with Franklin's collaborator, Samuel Garbett, to the use his invention for making the acid in leaden chambers, a process continued into the 20th century. Faujas de St. Fonds reported that Prestonpans was the greatest manufacturer of sulphuric acid in Great Britain at that date (1784). The entire process was kept secret; the works surrounded by high walls, past which no stranger was allowed.
Alongside William Cadell, an iron and timber merchant interested in the development of domestic iron production, Roebuck and Garbett organised what became the Carron Iron Works. The choice of site, one with water power, access to the sea transportation, etc. was studied during the spring and summer of 1759.
One of the obstacles, given the animosity against the English, was the lack of skilled masons and furnacemen in Scotland. Workers from England had to be imported on the sly. In January 1760, the first air furnace in Scotland was "blown in" at Carron. Nailers, and other craftsmen were also brought in to train the Scots. By 1770, Carron Company had nailers working at Carron, Camelon, St. Ninians, Kilsyth, Cramond, and Kirkcaldy. This industry proved to be a profitable cottage industry for a large number of poor families.
In 1767, as a result of a severe drought which stopped production for three months, a steam engine was built to raise and recycle the spent water. James Watt's first high-pressure steam engine was also used for winding coal in the Kinneil Colliery.
On November 15, 1771, Benjamin Franklin and his party arrived at the Carron Iron Works. The invitation for the visit had come from Samuel Garbett and his son-in-law Charles Gascoigne , also a partner in the iron works. In 1760, the infant forge had timidly advertised its production of "Dr. Franklin's Pennsylvania stoves," now a flourishing industry.
One of the specialty products manufactured at the Carron Works were cannon. The ordnance which Franklin and Merchant saw being cast at the Carron Works was to be employed later by their own countrymen against the British Empire. For when the neophyte American navy came into being four years later, the ships which went out from Boston, New Bedford and Philadelphia, under Nick Biddle, Jack Barry, and John Paul Jones, were equipped with Carronades, light naval cannons, also called "smashers", cast at the Carron foundry. The Carronade was the invention of Patrick Miller, a self-made man who had started out as a sailor and eventually became a Senator of the College of Justice, Director and later Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Scotland, and a director of the Carron Iron Works. Another of the partners at the Carron Works, Samuel Shrapnel, gave his name to the explosive shell still in use today.
During the American War of Independence, in 1777, nearly 2,000 men were employed at the Carron Iron Works. The economic impact of the works was considerable:


"The erection of this work hath quite altered the face
of the country around it. Besides the numerous buildings
raised for carrying on the manufacture, in a spot where
formerly there was not a single house, several villages have
been erected for the convenience of the workmen. The
neighbouring fields have been enclosed and improven,
many spots, which were formerly quite barren, have been
cultivated, and turned to good account;"


In 1787, Robert Burns attempted to tour the Carron Iron Works on a Sunday, when the plant was closed. The caretaker refused to admit Burns and his friend William Nicol. Disappointed, the Bard retired to an inn across the road and inscribed the following epigram into one of the windows of the inn:


We cam na here to view your warks,
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to hell,
It may be nae surprise:
But when we tir'l at your door
Your porter dought na hear us;
Sae may, shou'd we to Hell's yetts come,
Your billy Satan sair us!


That same year, Burns had the Edinburgh edition of his poems published. William Cadell, co-founder and owner of the Carron Company, was a subscriber.
Steam navigation had its beginnings at Carron. Patrick Miller, the inventor of the Carronade, had a small model steamer with 4-inch cylinders constructed there in 1788. Miller then financed the first full-sized steamship built in the British Isles, constructed and designed by William Symington and launched on the Carron River in 1789. By 1802, Symington had built and launched the Charlotte Dundas, a steam-powered tug designed for canal work. Robert Fulton, an American who had seen the Charlotte Dundas in 1802, brought a Boulton and Watt steam engine back to America and had it installed in a passenger boat which ran a 150 mile service between Albany and New York City. From that time, Scotland led the world in the construction of the best marine steam engines, and by 1860 the Clyde shipyards were the biggest and in the British Isles.
Patrick Miller played an important role in the life of Robert Burns. He first met Burns during the poet's trip to Edinburgh in 1786. Within weeks of their meeting, Burns accepted an offer from his new "generous friend" to lease a farm on Miller's estate near the town of Dumfries. He also provided Burns with a loan to build a farmhouse and fencing. Miller had made scientific experiments in agriculture. He invented a drill plough and a new type of threshing machine. It was he who first feed steamed potatoes to cattle.
The philosophy behind Benjamin Franklin's school of industrialisation appears to have carried on at the Carron Works; in September 1829, the following article about the works appeared in the London Morning Herald:


"The Company 'grow' their own workers, as an
extensive manufacturer has it, and hence their hands are
completely masters of their several departments. They pay
no attention to the fluctuations of the markets and the
currency; hard as the times are, they have never mentioned
a reduction of the wages, they have more humanity and
sagacity than to attempt to extract the last drop of sweat
from the poor workmen, and reduce them to the last ounce
of oatmeal; and consequently, all who are so fortunate as to
be in their employment are comfortable and contented, and
take a conscientious interest in the welfare of the concern."




V. THE "HEAVEN-TAUGHT PLOUGHMAN"


Is there no daring Bard will rise and tell
How glorious Wallace stood, how — hapless fell?
Is there nae poet, burning keen for fame,
Will try to gie us sangs and plays at hame?

- Robert Burns
Scots Prologue for Mr. Sutherland


Thirteen years after the battle of Culloden (1746), while Britain was at war with France, Robert Burns was born to a poor tenant farmer, in the town of Alloway in Ayrshire.
Burns' formal education was limited. In his early youth he developed a thirst for what he called "bookish knowledge." As he notes in his autobiography, the first two books he ever read (borrowed from the local blacksmith) made a life-long impression on him: The Life of Hannibal and The History of Sir William Wallace. They instilled in the youth a spirit of Scottish nationalism and the soul of the soldier who lives to fight tyranny. He also notes the influence of Shakespeare and other English poets. In his late twenties, Burns obtained a pocket edition of "Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me."
When not labouring in the fields, Burns studied Scotland's poets. In particular, he cites, as his predecessors, Allan Ramsey (1685-1758) and Robert Fergusson, who died in 1774 at the age of twenty-five. It is from the literary tributaries of Fergusson's vivacity and humor, that Burns' style flows. It is also Fergusson, whom we can credit with originating what has become known as the "Burns Stanza" (six lines rhyming A, A, A, B, A, B; with the A lines having four heavy stresses and the B only two). This is exemplified in the following passage from Burns' To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, Nov. 1785, which is also inspired by Fergusson's poem, On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street:

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!...

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy!

Still thou are blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!


In 1786, Burns had his first volume of collected poems published in a limited amount, known as the "Kilmarnock edition." Benjamin Franklin's friend, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, who intervened to prevent Burns from leaving Scotland, was the elderly leading cultural light of Edinburgh. Though blind , he was a poet, a skilled musician and a Doctor of Divinity.
Upon the invitation of Blacklock, Burns travelled to Edinburgh in 1786. There, observed Dr. Currie, "Blacklock received him with all the ardour of affectionate admiration; he eagerly introduced him to the respectable circle of his friends; he consulted his interest; he emblazoned his fame; he lavished upon him all the kindness of a generous and feeling heart, into which nothing selfish or envious ever found admittance." Later, Blacklock contributed songs to Burns' Musical Museum of Scottish songs, and just before Burns’ death attempted to publish a periodical with him.
It was undoubtedly Blacklock who first introduced Robert Burns to Henry Mackenzie, who had written a glowing review of Burns' first edition of poems in the December issue of his literary periodical The Lounger (from which originated the label which Burns received of the "heaven-taught ploughman"). Mackenzie drafted the terms of agreement between Burns and the Edinburgh publisher William Creech for the second edition of Burns' works, at a meeting between the three at Mackenzie's home in April of 1787. It was also Henry Mackenzie who, one year later, first introduced the work of Friedrich Schiller to the people of the British Isles, in an address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh which reviewed his drama The Robbers. That address sparked a series of positive reviews of Schiller in the British periodicals, including Edward Ash's short-lived, London-based The Speculator (1790) which was a propaganda vehicle for Schiller's works.
During his stay in Edinburgh, Burns arranged to become an Exciseman. After touring the Highlands and spending the winter in Edinburgh, he returned to the countryside in Ellisland to marry, farm, and write poetry.
Robert Burns was no chauvinistic advocate of the Jacobite cause, as some historians have portrayed him, but a strong supporter of the American War of Independence.
The so-called "Jacobite" songs of Burns, which he seems to have begun writing in earnest at the start of the French Revolution in 1789 were, for the most part, scathing polemics against the short-sighted, often violent, actions of the Jacobites. His song, The Battle of Sherramuir, lampoons both the English and Scots who fought in the 1715 uprising.
Burns' song Ballad on the American War shows the poet's had detailed knowledge of the personalities, issues, and military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. His enthusiasm for the Revolution is told in the Ode for General Washington's Birthday, in which he puts himself forward as the bard of America’s cause:

No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Aeolian I awake;
Tis liberty's bold note I swell,
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
See gathering thousands, while I sing,
A broken chain exulting bring,
And dash it in a tyrant's face,
And dare him to his very beard,
And tell him he no more is fear’d -
No more the despot of Columbia's race!
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd,
They shout — a People freed! They hail
an Empire sav’d.


In this tribute, written not in Scots but English – it was clearly intended to be read in America – there is an appeal to prevent "the generous English name" from being linked with such “damned deeds of everlasting shame!" Burns believed that the American Revolution would force the English Crown to bend to rule by Reason. But the poet's strongest polemics were reserved for his fellow Scots.


Scotland and the Revolution


With the success of the American Revolution, republicanism spread across Europe. In 1791, the first English-language edition printed in Europe, of the first part of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, sold over one million copies in the British Isles. It was even translated into Scots-Gaelic. The following year, the pro-republican Society of Friends of the People, was founded by a Scot in London; local chapters began to spring up across the land. One of the chief organisers was a young Glasgow barrister, Thomas Muir.
However, the aristocratic families of Europe were not about to surrender to the Age of Reason. Burns, like Schiller in Germany, fell prey to the sedition laws. During the American Revolutionary War, and then during the war with France in 1793, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Scotland, opening the door to sedition trials.
After the second part of Paine's Rights of Man, appeared in Great Britain in May of 1792, the government banned "seditious" meetings and publications, and more especially, Paine's book.
On June 4th of that year, the celebration of the King's birthday was marred by protests throughout Scotland. Hungry crowds in Edinburgh burnt the effigy Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate of Scotland. Troops were ordered to fire on the crowd.
By December 11th, the First Convention of the Scottish Friends of the People opened in Edinburgh; 150 delegates represented 80 societies from 35 towns and villages. The conference drafted a petition to the British Parliament demanding electoral reform. On the evening of the last day of the convention, it was suggested that the delegates arm themselves in order to help local magistrates suppress any riots which might occur as a result of the popular support for the reform petition. On January 1st, Thomas Muir was arrested and charged with circulating Paine's Rights of Man, making seditious speeches, and reading and defending the Address from the United Irishmen to the convention.
Muir was arrested on his way to attend the sedition trial of James Tytler, a friend of Robert Burns known as "Balloon" Tytler; he had made the first balloon flights in Great Britain in 1784. Tytler was arrested for publishing the handbill advertising the convention of the Friends of the People.
On his way to stand trial in Edinburgh, Thomas Muir, in chains, passed through the village of Gatehouse. Burns was there that day.
During the Muir trial, the evidence of the defendant's twenty-one witnesses was dismissed by Scotland's "hanging judge," Lord Braxfield, who sentenced Muir to be exiled to the penal colony of Botony Bay in Australia for fourteen years. Given the conditions of confinement and transportation, the sentence was a virtual death sentence. Braxfield's summary states that "a government in every country should be like a corporation" (e.g. the British East India Company), and reads in part:


"The British Constitution is the best that ever was
since the creation of the world and it is not possible to make
it better. For is not every man secure? Does not every man
reap the fruits of his own industry and sit under his own fig-
tree?
"What right has such a rabble to representation? In
this country the Government is made up of the landed
interest which alone has a right to be represented. As for
the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what
security has the nation for the payment of their taxes. They
may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the
country in the twinkling of an eye, but landed property can
not be removed."


The incident prompted Burns to write the song Scots Wha Hae, in protest. Though the song was banned as seditious, it would become Scotland's true national anthem:


By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your Son's in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud Usurpers low
Tyrants fall in every foe!
LIBERTY'S in every blow!
Let us Do — or Die!!!


As Burns reported, that anthem was inspired by "the glowing ideas of some other struggles, not quite so ancient."


Charged With Sedition


It was at that time that Robert Burns was officially investigated for sedition. Burns had been allowed some latitude by the authorities, because by the 1790's he was acknowledged to be the national poet. At one convivial event, after a toast to Prime Minister William Pitt was drunk, Burns proposed "a bumper to the health of a much better man — George Washington!" This outspokenness led to a challenge to a duel, forced upon him by an offended English officer. Fortunately, the duel never occurred.
As oppression intensified, Burns assumed the role of "loyal opponent" in order to criticize the British Crown. This role, however, became more uneasy as the crisis provoked by the French Revolution erupted in 1789.
By 1793, pro-republican clubs began to be outlawed, including the Society of Friends, which had a chapter in Dumfries, where Burns was then living. During the trial of Thomas Muir, Burns hid his copies of Paine's books in the house of, George Haugh, the Dumfries tinsmith.
Burns' republican activities, however, were not purely literary. In 1792, in his capacity as Exciseman, he led a contingent of Royal dragoons against a smuggler's ship, an incident is immortalised in a song he wrote while waiting for the dragoons to arrive, entitled The Deil's Awa. The four small cannons (Carronades) from the captured ship, which he sent on to the French Assembly. A royalist spy in the Scottish Excise, shortly afterwards, denounced Burns as unpatriotic. On January 10, 1793 a formal investigation on charges for sedition was initiated against him by the Excise Board. The poet replied, "As to France, I was her enthusiastic votary in the beginning of the business — When she came to show her old avidity for conquest...I altered my sentiments." The investigation of Burns was dropped.
As the Jacobin mobs terrorised France, Burns became in 1795 one of the founders of a local militia, the Royal Dumfries Volunteers. Though ill, he joined and drilled with his regiment, against the threat of a possible French invasion.
These actions by Burns were not a betrayal of his earlier political allegiance. He opposed tyranny, in whatever guise.