refuses the smallest aid to the science or literature of Scotland.
Centralization deprives the people of the power to educate themselves, by
drawing from them more than thirty millions of dollars, raised by
taxation, and it leaves the professors in the colleges of Scotland in the
enjoyment of chairs, the emoluments of many of which are but $1,200 per
annum. Whence, then, can come the demand for books, or the power to
compensate the people who make them? Not, assuredly, from the mass of
unhappy people who occupy the Highlands, whose starving condition
furnishes so frequent occasion for the comments of their literary
countrymen; nor, as certainly, from the wretched inhabitants of the wynds
of Glasgow, or from the weavers of Paisley. Centralization is gradually
separating the people into two classes--the very rich, who live in
London, and the very poor, who remain in Scotland; and with the progress
of this division there is a gradual decay in the feeling of national
pride, that formerly so much distinguished the people of Scotland. The
London "Leader" tells its readers that "England is a power made up of
conquests over nationalities;" and it is right. The nationality of
Scotland has disappeared; and, however much it may annoy our Scottish
friends[1] to have the energetic and intelligent Celt sunk in the "slow
and unimpressible" Saxon, such is the tendency of English centralization,
everywhere destructive of that national feeling which is essential to
progress in civilization.

[Footnote 1: See Blackwood's Magazine, Sept. 1853, art. "Scotland since
the Union."]

Looking to Ireland, we find a similar state of things. Seventy years
since, that country was able to insist upon and to establish its claim for
an independent government, and, by aid of the measures then adopted, was
rapidly advancing. From that period to the close of the century the demand