PAMPHLET. 267 



originated a few months later, and it was on this occasion 

 that I became one of the Proprietors of the Paper. I 

 undertook to repay, by instalments, the thousand pounds 

 originally advanced by the subscribers to Mr Johnstone, 

 with the interest, year by year, of the unpaid portion in 

 hand, until the entire debt should be extinguished. It 

 had at first been proposed to make the thousand pounds 

 over to me as a boon ; but I was startled by some of the 

 conditions attached, and insisted that the terms of the 

 transaction should be those of ordinary business. Strange 

 enough, however, though the wish was acceded to, the 

 terms were not softened ; and the document drawn up 

 for the signatures of the Proprietors by Mr J. G. Wood 

 appeared so strange, even to my unpractised eyes, that I 

 requested my partner, Mr Fairly, to submit it to his man 

 of business. I found I had not mistaken its character ; 

 the man of business had never seen such a document 

 before. And so a somewhat different sort of document 

 had to be drawn up by another hand ; and it is this 

 second document that defines the existing relations of 

 the Witness Proprietors and the Committee. Nothing 

 certainly could be more strangely despotic than the terms 

 of the first. To one of these I must specially refer : it 

 would have so stringently fastened down upon the Pro- 

 prietors, Mr Somers of the Scottish Herald, in the ca- 

 pacity of Sub-Editor, that were they subsequently to be- 

 come dissatisfied with him (and he was an untried man 

 at the time), they could not have shaken him off. His 

 position was to be rendered legally independent, both of 

 the Editor and the Proprietors of the Witness. I shall 

 not here inquire whether Mr Somers's after-management 

 of the Paper quite justified the wisdom of the position 

 which Mr Wood, in the behalf of his clients, would so 

 fain have assigned to him ; but I may surely take the 



