Bailie Jarvie to get his sons employment in a factory: "Make my sons
weavers! I would see every loom in Glasgow, beam, treadle, and
shuttles, burnt in hell-fire sooner!" To break the force of the strong
military power, and to secure to the industrious classes the rights of
human beings, required a continuous warfare which lasted through many
centuries, and which is far from being finished at the present time.
But, thanks to the sturdy valor of the burghers of the middle ages,
human liberty was maintained and transmitted to succeeding
generations.

[Illustration: _Dutch Dikes_]

7. Hitherto in the history of the world mountains had been found
necessary for the preservation of human liberty. Thermopylae,
Morgarten, Bannockburn, were all fought where precipitous hill-sides
and narrow valleys prevented the champions of freedom from being
overwhelmed by numbers, and where a single man in defense of his home
could wield more power than ten men in attack. The tyrants who lorded
it over plains had learned by dear experience to shun mountains and
avoid collisions with mountaineers; and, in case of controversies,
they always endeavored to gain by stratagem what they could not obtain
by force. Austrian tyranny had dashed itself in vain against the Alps,
and English tyranny had turned back southward, thwarted and impotent,
from the Scotch Highlands.

8. But it was to be demonstrated that liberty might have a home in
other than mountain fastnesses. Along the North Sea is a stretch of
country redeemed from the ocean. Great dikes, faced with granite from
Norway, withstand the tempest from the turbulent ocean, and smaller
dikes prevent inundations from rivers. In thousands of square miles