Hugh Miller, in one of his geological lectures, thus refers to the coal workers of Midlothian :—
"One of the most distinctive characters of the flat track which overlies the basin of the Midlothian coal measures—the feature that strikes the eye of the traveller who hurries along its line of railway as peculiarly its own —consists in its numerous coal works and in its lines of low-roofed huts, uniform in their humble mediocrity as those of slave villages. The dwellers in these low huts have a very singular history regarded as that of Scotchmen. It is not yet fully eighty years (says he, writing about the year 1855) since they were slaves, as firmly bound to the soil as the serfs of Russia, and transferable, like the huts in which they dwelt or the minerals amid which they burrowed, from the hands of one proprietor to another. . . . Profoundly ignorant—kept apart, by their underground profession and their peculiar habits, from the other people of the country—and withal not very formidable from their, numbers, their liberty seems to have been taken from them piecemeal, mainly during the seventeenth century, by the Acts of Parliaments, in which, of course, they were wholly unrepresented, and by the decisions of a Court in which no one ever appeared for their interests. It was the old Scottish Parliament and our present Court of Session that made the colliers slaves ; and the salters or salt makers of the north-eastern shores of Midlothian were associated with them in bondage.”
There seems to be no doubt whatever that this was so, and it arose from the immense territorial power of the coal proprietors, who were virtually the authors of the Acts and the prompters of the decisions, and in proof of this we quote a few passages from these iniquitous laws bearing out our statement. In the year 1606, it was statute and ordained, under a penalty of £100, that no person within the realm should hire or employ colliers, coal bearers, or salters, unless furnished with sufficient testimonial from the master whom he had last served; and further, ‘that sae mony colliers, coal bearers, and salters,”’ as without such testimonial received such ‘‘forewages and fees, should be esteemed, repute, and holden as thieves, and punished in their bodies.” ‘‘ Pretty well,” says honest Hugh, ‘‘as a specimen of the class legislation of the good old times!” This Act, however, stringent as it may seem, was found insufficient; there was a class of persons employed in the pits whom it did not include ; and so in 1661, it was farther enacted, ‘‘that because watermen, who lave and draw water in the coal-heugh-heads, and gatesmen who work the ways and passages in the said heughs, are as neces-
