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Strangers to Scotland, and many Scots themselves, often feel puzzled by the hero-worship which so many bestow upon Robert Burns. The truth is that if Burns had never lived, Scotland could hardly have avoided going the way of ancient English-speaking kingdoms whose indentity is long lost, merged within a greater whole. Scotland today would rank alongside Mercia or Northumbria or Wessex, of interest as an antiquity, a curiosity or an affectation. If Scotland is anything more in modern times, it is because Burns, speaking as and for the ordinary man, stemmed the tide of history, flowing strongly in the direction of absorption and integration. His work meant that a sense of identity was preserved at a time when the politically active classes in Scotland showed little interest in any such sense. Aristocracy is by its nature international. It is ordinary people, involved with humbler local community life, who have greater national awareness. These ordinary people had no political power until more than a century had passed, but when in due course these people for whom Burns spoke did gain the right to political participation, Scotland was still there.

Burns's lowly status and bucolic innocence have been greatly exaggerated, not least by himself, for what might be termed reasons of publicity. He was educated, beyond the average of his class and time, at an 'adventure' school, run by one Murdoch, as a business venture in Ayr. With this degree of education, and as the son of a tenant farmer, he had a modest measure of leisure, and an interest in the written word. Men like Burns, educated to full literacy and to some extent self employed, were the most receptive audience for the political writings which attended the American Revolution, and, some ten years later, the French Revolution. Smiths and tailors, weavers and cobblers, were to some extent able to determine their own working hours, and could award themselves some time for study and discussion. Members of these crafts were famous for generations for their interest in radical politics, and around anvil and bench, loom and last, many an impromptu debating society flourished; discussing public events, recent publications and their own social condition. By the 1790s they could have been discussing the triumph of democracy in America and the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity extended to all men by the French revolutionaries after 1789.

In England support for reform in the 1770s had led in time to the creation of the 'Friends of the People', mainly well-intentioned and high-minded nobles, gentry and urban professional men, whose friendship had in it elements of condescension. The Scottish 'Friends' were more genuinely 'of the People'. When in 1792 and in 1793 the Scottish 'Friends' assembled under the exciting influence of events in France, there were present representatives from active reform societies, mostly craftsmen and members of professions, from most areas of the country. Emerging as a leading figure in the Convention was the young Glasgow lawyer, Thomas Muir, who had already gained a reputation by circulating pamphlets and analysing their contents at meetings of 'Friends' in many towns and villages. Unfortunately for Muir, the revolution in France had become increasingly violent in character. Sympathy for the revolution therefore ebbed; and the British government, genuinely afraid of revolutionary infection, and happy to see the reform movement discredited by bloodshed in France,