e realm
should provide a commodious schoolhouse and should pay a moderate
stipend to a schoolmaster. The effect could not be immediately felt.
But, before one generation had passed away, it began to be evident
that the common people of Scotland were superior in intelligence to
the common people of any other country in Europe. To whatever land the
Scotchman might wander, to whatever calling he might betake himself, in
America or in India, in trade or in war, the advantage which he derived
from his early training raised him above his competitors. If he was
taken into a warehouse as a porter, he soon became foreman. If he
enlisted in the army, he soon became a serjeant. Scotland, meanwhile,
in spite of the barrenness of her soil and the severity of her climate,
made such progress in agriculture, in manufactures, in commerce, in
letters, in science, in all that constitutes civilisation, as the Old
World had never seen equalled, and as even the New World has scarcely
seen surpassed.

This wonderful change is to be attributed, not indeed solely, but
principally, to the national system of education. But to the men by whom
that system was established posterity owes no gratitude. They knew
not what they were doing. They were the unconscious instruments of
enlightening the understandings and humanising the hearts of millions.
But their own understandings were as dark and their own hearts as
obdurate as those of the Familiars of the Inquisition at Lisbon. In the
very month in which the Act for the settling of Schools was touched with
the sceptre, the rulers of the Church and State in Scotland began to
carry on with vigour two persecutions worthy of the tenth century,
a persecution of witches and a persecution of infidels. A crowd of
wretches, guilty only of being old and miserable, were accused of
trafficking with the devil. The Privy Council was not ashamed to issue
a Commission for the trial of twenty-two of these poor creatures. [796]
The shops of the booksellers of Edinburgh were strictly searched for
heretical works. Impious books, among which the sages of the Presbytery
ranked Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, were strictly
suppressed. [797] But the destruction of mere paper and sheepskin would
not satisfy the bigots. Their hatred required victims who could feel,
and was not appeased till they had perpetrated a crime such as has never
since polluted the island.

A student of eighteen, named Thomas Aikenhead, whos