superiority of America, a land peopled by our own race, a home for
freemen in which every citizen's privilege was every man's
right--these were the exciting themes upon which I was nurtured. As a
child I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their
deaths a service to the state and hence an heroic act.

Such is the influence of childhood's earliest associations that it was
long before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any
privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some
good way and therefore earned the right to public respect. There was
still the sneer behind for mere pedigree--"he is nothing, has done
nothing, only an accident, a fraud strutting in borrowed plumes; all
he has to his account is the accident of birth; the most fruitful part
of his family, as with the potato, lies underground." I wondered that
intelligent men could live where another human being was born to a
privilege which was not also their birthright. I was never tired of
quoting the only words which gave proper vent to my indignation:

"There was a Brutus once that would have brooked
Th' eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king."

But then kings were kings, not mere shadows. All this was inherited,
of course. I only echoed what I heard at home.

Dunfermline has long been renowned as perhaps the most radical town in
the Kingdom, although I know Paisley has claims. This is all the more
creditable to the cause of radicalism because in the days of which I
speak the population of Dunfermline was in large part composed of men
who were small manufacturers, each owning his own loom or looms. They