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The humble petition of the heritors in Banffshire, to his grace his majesty's high commissioner and right honourable estates of parliament
May it please your grace and right honourable estates,
That after a long and expensive war we expected to have enjoyed the blessing of a happily concluded peace by the re-establishing our foreign trade, encouraging of home manufactories, employing the poor in the improvement of our native product and the lessening of our public burden, but instead thereof, to our unspeakable loss and almost ruin of the nation, we find our trade abroad sensibly decayed and our coin carried out by the importation of commodities from places where ours are prohibited; our woollen and other manufactories at home, by the same means and the remissness of magistrates in putting the laws into due execution, do not receive the encouragement which the interest of the country requires, whereby our poor are neither maintained nor employed as otherwise they might; and more especially our Company Trading to Africa and the Indies meet with so much opposition from abroad and gets so little support at home, that after so great a loss of men and expense of treasure, their settlement in Caledonia may now too probably a second time fall under the same unlucky circumstances as first, if not prevented. And yet, after all these hardships which the nation groans under, the numerous forces kept on foot while our much wealthier neighbours are disbanding, which occasions now in time of peace heavy and unnecessary taxes, all which misfortunes and other calamities which have of late befallen us we cannot but look upon as the effects of the displeasure of the Almighty God for the great immoralities that everywhere so much abounds amongst all ranks and degrees of men, to the dishonour of God and our holy religions, and the debauching the spirits and the corrupting the manners of the people.
May it therefore please your grace and the right honourable estates of parliament to take some effectual course for curbing vice and putting into execution the many laudable laws for maintaining and employing the poor, that they may be useful and not burdensome to the kingdom; and for the encouragement of manufactories at home and carrying our trade abroad with advantage, to lay on such prohibitions upon the branches of our import as may overbalance our export, and particularly that of France; and to assert our African and Indian Company's right to their colony of Caledonia, which has been and still is unjustly called into question, and to give such support to it as may encourage the adventurers to go on with their undertaking, which, if vigorously pursued, may tend so much in the future to the wealth, honour and interest of the nation; and to relieve our country of so great a number of forces every way so uneasy to the people, and, in lieu thereof, to fall upon such other methods for security of the peace and support of the government as may be more for the interest of the kingdom and more consistent with the liberty of the subjects.
†Edinburgh, 9 January 1701
Presented and read in parliament.