ng
person, I should neither scorn his intimation, nor feel justifiable
in crushing him to death, merely because he is a filthy little
abridgment of a crocodile. Therefore, 'for my love, I pray you, wrong
me not.'

I am old, sir, poor, and peevish, and therefore I may be wrong; but
when I look back on the last fifteen or twenty years, and more
especially on the last ten, I think I see my native country of
Scotland, if it is yet to be called by a title so discriminative,
falling, so far as its national, or rather, perhaps, I ought now to
say its _provincial_, interests are concerned, daily into more
absolute contempt. Our ancestors were a people of some consideration
in the councils of the empire. So late as my own younger days, an
English minister would have paused, even in a favourite measure, if a
reclamation of national rights had been made by a member for Scotland,
supported as it uniformly then was, by the voice of her
representatives and her people. Such ameliorations in our peculiar
system as were thought necessary, in order that North Britain might
keep pace with her sister in the advance of improvement, were
suggested by our own countrymen, persons well acquainted with our
peculiar system of laws (as different from those of England as from
those of France), and who knew exactly how to adapt the desired
alteration to the principle of our legislative enactments, so that the
whole machine might, as mechanics say, work well and easily. For a
long time this wholesome check upon innovation, which requires the
assimilation of a proposed improvement with the general constitution
of the country to which it has been recommended, and which ensures
that important point, by stipulating that the measure shall originate
with those to whom the spirit of the constitution is familiar, has
been, so far as Scotland is concerned, considerably disused. Those who
have stepped forward to repair the gradual failure of our
constitutional system of law, have been persons that, howsoever
qualified in other respects, have had little further knowledge of its
construction than could be acquired by a hasty and partial survey,
taken just before they commenced their labours. Scotland and her laws
have been too often subjected to the alterations of any person who
chose to found himself a reputation, by bringing in a bill to cure
some defect which had never been felt in practice, but which was
represented as a frightful bugbear to English states