worse than the mon, and are t^enerally found at the bottom of every infatiiouB trttiiaaction that is conunifcted in the colony.^' In all accounts of the early days of the colony the arrival of convicts called **the Scotch Martyrs" finds coiispicuoua place. They are described as if they were all equally amiahle, equally ardent for the good of mankind, and martyred through an ignorant panic which seized the British government, and blinded them to the fact that the Martyrs merely sought for parliamentary reform. Even the sober page of history has assumed that they were specu- 1 lative philanthropists, who were brutally transported in the company of felons. In a more ephemeral Avork, entitled
- Eeminiscence8 of Glasgow;/' it is gravely stated that]
" Margaret was a light-liearted Englishmaii, with a sprightly wafe who died iu grief soon after his banishment;" and on a monument at Carlton Hill in Edinburgh is to be seen an iuscription linking together the names of Muir, Talmer, Bkirving, Margarot, and Gerald, Those who have waded through the records of the time, and the MSS. w"bich serve to explain them, must smile at I the facility of belief extended to grosB errors. It is true that Muir, Gerald, and tiieir associates laboured ostensibly for reform in Parliament, but it is equally true that these associates mapped out Great Britain in departments, that they invited re|U'esBntatives in Convention after the fasliion of the FrencJ] Eevolutionists, that they corresponded w4th fthe most fervid French anarchists, and that they eagerly awaited (to use their own language) an invasion of England
- by the hero of Italy and the brave veterans of the gieat
nation." The question, however, as to whether Pitt and Dundas were wise in their treatment of the Ltuidon Corresponding Society, the Edinburgh British Convention, and similar associations, is rather for English than Auskalian history. It was a declared struggle for life or death, for the main- tenance or the uprooting of the constitutio!i. Pitt succeeded, mnd bis defence of his conduct may be read in his speech in the House of Commons on the 7th May 1703, while the strife waa at the hottest. The allegations that the Scotch Martyrs were ill-treated after conviction are refuted by their o^yn words, Muii*, Palmer, Margarot, and ykirviiig arrived
