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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: public and private. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes
was like, in Buchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there
remains proof enough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David
Lindsay--that the morality of the populace, which looked up to the
nobles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. As
anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and
Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that
into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty
years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order
or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French
"civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the
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