r,
1793, and was attended by delegates from the London Corresponding
Society as well as from Scottish branches. Nothing was intended beyond
the holding of what we should call to-day a conference or congress. But
the word "Convention" with its reminiscence of the French revolutionary
assembly seems to have caused the Government some particular alarm. The
Convention, after some days of orderly debate, was invaded by the
magistrates and broken up. Margarot and Sinclair (the English
delegates), Skirving, Palmer and Thomas Muir, were tried before that
notorious hanging judge, whom Stevenson portrayed as Weir of Hermiston,
and sentenced to fourteen years' deportation at Botany Bay.

Of these five, all of them young men of brilliant promise and high
courage, only one, Margarot, lived to return to England. Muir, daring,
romantic and headstrong, contributed to the history of the movement a
page of adventure which might invite the attention of a novelist. He
escaped from Botany Bay on a whaler, was wrecked on the coast of South
America, contrived to wander to the West Indies, there shipped on a
Spanish vessel for Europe, fell in with an English frigate, was wounded
in the fight that followed, and had the good fortune to find among the
officers who took him prisoner an old friend, who recognised him, and
assisted him to conceal his identity. He was landed in Spain, invited
to Paris and pensioned by the Convention, but died shortly after his
arrival. Less romantic but even finer is Sinclair's story. He obtained
bail while his comrades were tried and sentenced. He might have broken
his bail, and his friends urged him to do so, but with the certainty
that Botany Bay lay before him he none the less returned to Edinburgh,
as Horne Tooke puts it "in discharge of his faith as a private man
towards his bail, and in discharge of his duty towards an oppressed and
insulted public; he has returned not to take a fair trial, but, as he is
well persuaded, to a settled conviction and sentence." Joseph Gerrald,
another member of the same group gave the same fine example of courage,
surrendered to his bail, and was sent for fifteen years to Botany Bay.

The ferment was more than an intellectual stirring. It brought with it a
moral elevation and a great courage that did not shrink from venturing
life and fortune for a disinterested end. The modern reader is apt to
indulge a smile when he reads in the ardent declamation of this time
professions of a