ce to face with
the hour that was to cut them off from their favorite drink, a sudden
discontent flashed out in the form of wide-spread riot. Only the most
energetic action on the part of the authorities prevented the
discontent from breaking into wholesale disturbance.

It does not seem as if the Gin Act did much for the cause of sobriety.
Public opinion among the populace was too decidedly against it to allow
of its being made a reality. Gin was every day sold under various
names, and, indeed, it was publicly sold in many shops under its own
name. The Gin Act called into existence an odious crew of common
informers who used to entrap people into the selling and drinking of
gin in order to obtain their share of the penalty, or, perhaps, in some
cases to satisfy a personal spleen. The mob hated the common informers
as bitterly as a well-dressed crowd at a race-course in our own time
hates a "welsher." When the informer was got hold of by his enemies he
was usually treated very much after the fashion in which the welsher is
handled to-day.

It would be needless to say that the Gin Act and the agitation
concerning it called also into existence a whole literature of
pamphlets, ballads, libels, and lampoons. The agitation ran its course
during some two years, more than once threatened to involve the country
in serious disturbance, and died out at last when the legislation which
had caused so much tumult was quietly allowed to become a dead letter.

{58}

Suddenly Edinburgh became the theatre of a series of dramatic events
which made her, for the moment, the centre of interest to the political
world. It is, perhaps, a sufficient proof of the delicate condition of
the relations between the two countries that the arrest of two
smugglers came within measurable distance of awaking civil war. These
two smugglers, Wilson and Robertson, being under sentence of death,
made, while in church under armed escort, a desperate effort to escape.
Wilson, a man of great strength, by holding two soldiers with his hand,
and a third with his teeth, gave Robertson the chance, which he gladly
seized, of plunging into the crowd of the dispersing congregation, and
vanishing into space.

[Sidenote: 1736--John Porteous]

The Edinburgh magistrates, alarmed at the escape, offended by the
display of popular sympathy with the escaped smuggler, and fearing,
not, as it was said, without good cause, that an attempt would be made
to rescue th