of the negro or the foreigner, could not come into contact with the soil of Britain without ceasing to be slavery ; and yet the poor Scotch collier, buried in that very soil, and bearing about with him its stains, still remained a slave. Not until the year 1775 did the law, which had so insidiously bound him, set him even nominally free ; and certainly very strange, regarded as a British law of the latter half of the eighteenth century, is the preamble of that Act which extended to him in the first in- stance a verbal freedom. ‘ Whereas,’ it runs, ‘by the statute law of Scotland, as explained by the Judges of the Courte of Law there, many colliers, coal bearers, and salters, are in a state of slavery and bondage, bound to the collieries and salt works, where they work for life, transferable with the collieries and salt works.’”
This emancipatory Act failed in its object in consequence of certain conditions attached to it, which the poor workers underground were too improvident and too incapable of implementing ; and their actual emancipation did not take place until the year 1799, when it was effected by a second Act, which bluntly enough in its preamble stated, that notwithstanding the former enactment, '‘many colliers and coal bearers still continued in a state of bondage in Scotland.” The galling nature of this bondage, and the inadequate pay they received, must have frequently evoked disturbances between master and servants. From the Edinburgh Courant of 22nd June 1782, we learn, that ‘“‘on Wednesday last a number of Lord Abercorn’s bound colliers of Duddingston gave up working, and insisted for an increase of wages. Upon the Sheriff's warrant they were seized by a party of dragoons, and five of the ringleaders brought to town, two of whom were sent on board the tender in Leith Road, and the others dismissed on a promise of good behaviour.”
Hugh Miller further gives a graphic sketch from his own experience. When a mason lad he wrought at the building of Niddrie House about the year 1825. In the pursuit of his geological studies he had frequent opportunities of judging of the condition of the colliers in the neighbourhood, whose hard lot touched his heart with pity. He says :—
"When residing in a village in the neighbouring coalfield, nearly thirty years ago, I had many opportunities of conversing with Scotchmen, the colliers of a neighbouring hamlet, who had been born slaves ; and at that time I found the class still strongly marked by the slave nature. Though legally only transferable in the earlier time, with the works and minerals to which they were attached, cases occasionally occurred in which they
