Britain 719
Some of Robert Burns’ poems, before his change of sentiment, were of the same
character, as in his “a man’s a man for a’ that.” How much such verses circulated
locally and orally is not known.^17
The English radicalism of the 1790’s, to summarize, so far as it was represented
by the popular clubs, was largely a disturbance among what must be called the
lower middle class, since for one reason or another persons above this level either
took little part, or ceased to take part, after 1793. It is this more genuinely popular
character of organized discontent that distinguishes the reform movement of the
1790’s from the agitations of the days of Wilkes and the American Revolution.
In Scotland the disaffection was more broadly based. For example, when the
Whig Club of Dundee sent an address of greeting to the French Assembly,
seventy- six persons signed it, virtually all of whose occupations were also given.^18
There were eleven “esquires” and eleven members of the clergy. There were one doc-
tor and three surgeons. There were two “writers”—a word used in Scotland to
mean a kind of lawyer. There were thirty- three merchants. With them were the
rector of a school, a teacher of English and a teacher of mathematics—also a
watchmaker, an architect, a dyer, a stationer, and a baker. It is a list of the sort that
one might expect from Ireland or parts of the Continent, but not from England.
The Scottish Society of Friends of the People likewise had a mixed membership,
where the English society of the same name, with its dues of two- and- a- half guin-
eas, was limited to the well- to- do. A lingering feeling against England, a sense of
exclusion from public life (there were only about 1,300 actual freehold voters in a
population of a million), a Presbyterian habit of participation in common affairs,
the repeated splits and disputes among Presbyterians since the Union, the connec-
tion between church and state, the existence of severe poverty along with a wide-
spread literacy, the sermons of itinerant and unauthorized preachers, who were
frowned upon by established Presbyterians, and much inclined to anti- aristocratic
outbursts, combined to spread discontent in Scotland, especially as the American
and French Revolutions, over the period of a generation, began to arouse a new
political consciousness.
One other feature of the radicalism of the day—English, Scottish, and Irish—
may be mentioned as of more than incidental importance. Many troublemakers
left the country, not like Dutch or Italian refugees fleeing to France and hoping
soon to return, but to places so distant as to make them thereafter inoffensive to
the established order. This exodus took the form both of more or less voluntary
emigration to America, and of involuntary transportation to Botany Bay. The
number of those going to America in the decade before 1800 is not known, but it
included Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Vaughan, Thomas Cooper, John Binns, and
Joseph Gales from England; James Callender from Scotland; William Duane and
John Daly Burk, and for a few years Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy, and Hamilton
Rowan, from Ireland. Australia had received a heterogeneous lot of some 8,000
convicts by 1799. Some of these were vicious characters; but at a time when there
17 On Wilson see Meikle, Scotland, 121; on Mather, W. H. G. Armitage, “Joseph Mather: Poet
of the Filesmiths,” in Notes and Queries, Vol. 195 (1950), 320–22.
18 The address, dated June 10, 1790, is printed in full in the appendix to Veitch, Genesis, 359–62.
See also Meikle, Scotland.