cept when rebellion or riot were raging, we cannot discover, from his papers, that he ever, on any one occasion, required any other assistance, except the ordinary authority of which law is always possessed, when administered fairly. He rigidly investigated, though he did not severely punish, popular outrages; but he was unsparing in his prosecution of the provincial injustice, by which the people were generally oppressed. The consequence of this was, that he not only introduced a comparative state of good order, but made his name a sanction, that whatever he proposed was right—and that in him the injured was sure to find a friend. When Thomas Rawlinson, an Englishman, who was engaged in a mining concern in Glengarry, (and who by the bye is said to have been the first person who introduced the philibeg into the highlands), had two of his servants murdered by the natives there, the lord advocate was the only individual to whom it ever occurred to him to apply for protection. But his power in thus taming the people, can only be fairly estimated, by perceiving how universally he was feared by the higher ranks, as the certain foe of all sorts of partial, sinister, unfair, or illiberal projects. Few men ever wrote, or were written to, with less idea of publication than he. His correspondence has only come accidentally to light about seventy years after his death. Yet we have not been able to detect a single one of his advices or proceedings, by the exposure of which, even a private gentleman, of the most delicate honour, and the most reasonable views, would
have cause to feel a moment's uneasiness. On the contrary, though living in ferocious times—in public life—the avowed organ of a party—and obliged to sway his country, by managing its greatest and greediest families, he uniformly maintains that native gentleness and fairness of mind with which it is probable that most of the men, who are afterwards hardened into corruption, begin, and resolve to continue, their career. How many other public men are there, of whose general correspondence above 500 letters could be published indiscriminately, without alarming themselves if they were alive, or their friends if they were dead?
Having thus freed himself from the shackles of party, and impressed all ranks with a conviction of the necessity of sinking their subordinate contests in a common respect for the law, his next great view seems to have been, to turn this state of security to its proper account, in improving the trade and agriculture of the kingdom. Of these two sources of national wealth, the last seems to have engaged the smallest portion of his attention; and it was perhaps natural that it should do so. For, though agriculture precedes manufactures in the order of things, yet, for this very reason, that the cultivation of the land has gone on for ages, it is only in a more advanced era of refinement, that the attention of legislators is called to the resources it supplies, and the virtues it inspires. But projectors are immediately attracted towards improvements in manufactures, which are directly convenient by employing industry, and highly captivating, because their commencement and growth can be distinctly traced; so that they appear more the result of preparation and design than agriculture does; as to which, one generation seems only to follow the example of another, in passively taking what the scarcely assisted powers of nature give. Several efforts at trade had been made by Scotland before Forbes appeared; but it was both the cause and the evidence of the national poverty, that, slender as they were, they had failed, and that their failure almost extinguished the commercial hopes of the people. He was no sooner called into public life, than he saw what trade, chiefly internal, could do, by giving employment to the hordes of idlers who infested the country, by interesting proprietors in the improvement of their estates, and by furnishing the means both of paying and of levying taxes, and thereby consolidating the whole island into one compact body, instead of keeping the northern part a burden on the southern.
