Doubtless he held that the mob, or, as we more
decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true
freedom. "I cannot read in history," he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw,
"of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal
and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical
government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military
despotism." But he does not seem ever to have perceived that educated
men identify themselves with "the rascal and uninstructed populace,"
whenever they indulge on behalf of the selfish interests of their own
class, passions such as he had indulged in fighting for his brother's
pension. It is not the want of instruction, it is the rascaldom, i. e.
the violent _esprit de corps_ of a selfish class, which "naturally
leads" to violent remedies. Such rascaldom exists in all classes, and
not least in the class of the cultivated and refined. Generous and
magnanimous as Scott was, he was evidently by no means free from the
germs of it.
One more illustration of Scott's political Conservatism, and I may
leave his political life, which was not indeed his strong side,
though, as with all sides of Scott's nature, it had an energy and
spirit all his own.
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