[Sidenote: POVERTY OF THE COMMON PEOPLE.]
With their disputatious learning the meagreness of their fare and the squalor of their dwellings but ill contrasted. “Dirty living,” said Smollett, “is the great and general reproach of the commonalty of this kingdom.”[225] While Scotland sent forth into the world year after year swarms of young men trained in thrift, well stored with knowledge, and full of energy and determination, the common people bore an ill-repute for industry. They were underfed, and under-feeding produced indolent work. “Flesh-meat they seldom or never tasted; nor any kind of strong liquor except two-penny at times of uncommon festivity.”[226] “Ale,” wrote Lord Kames, “makes no part of the maintenance of those in Scotland who live by the sweat of their brow. Water is their only drink.”[227] Adam Smith admitted that both in bodily strength and personal appearance they were below the English standard. “They neither work so well, nor look so well.”[228] Wolfe, when he returned to England from Scotland in 1753, said that he had not crossed the Border a mile when he saw the difference that was produced upon the face of the country by labour and industry. “The English are clean and laborious, and the Scotch excessively dirty and lazy.”[229]
This dirtiness would offend an Englishman more than a man of any other nation, for “high and low, rich and poor, they were remarkable for cleanness all the world over.”[230] Matthew Bramble, in Smollett’s _Humphry Clinker_, notices the same change. “The boors of Northumberland,” he wrote, “are lusty fellows, fresh-complexioned, cleanly and well-clothed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby. The cattle are much in the same style with their drivers, meagre, stunted, and ill-equipt.”[231] Topham, in his _Letters from Edinburgh_, asserts the misery, but denies the idleness. Temperance and labour were, he says, in the extreme; nevertheless, on all sides were seen, “haggard looks, meagre complexions, and bodies weakened by fatigue and worn down by the inclemency of the seasons.” Neither were the poor of the capital any better off. Their wretchedness and poverty exceeded, he thought, what was to be found anywhere else in the whole world. But though as a nation the Scotch were very poor, yet they were very honest.[232] A traveller through the country in 1766 goes so far as to maintain that the common people in outward appearance would not at first be taken to be of the human species. Though their indigence was extreme, yet they would rather suffer poverty than labour. Their nastiness was greater than could be reported. Happily their rudeness was beginning to wear off, and in the trading towns where the knowledge of the use of money was making them eager enough to acquire it, they were already pretty well civilized and industrious.[233] Wages were miserably low. The Scotch labourer received little more than half what was paid to the Englishman; yet grain was dearer in Scotland than in England.[234] The historian of Edinburgh thus sums the general condition of the labouring poor:—