I know you guys like to celebrate these things and as nobody else has mentioned it I will. Yesterday was the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Union when the Scottish and English parliaments combined.
President Abraham Lincoln was a big fan of Robert Burns our national poet and always carried a book of his poems. This is what Burns said about the event:-
Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory!
Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name,
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Solway sands,
An’ Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England’s province stands ..
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue
Thro’ many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor’s wages.
The English steel we could disdain
Secure in valour’s station;
But English gold has been our bane..
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O, would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour
I’ll mak this declaration:-
“We’re bought and sold for English gold”..
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Written by Robert Burns our National bard about the Treaty Of Union of 1707 which happened 300 years ago yesterday and which was supposed to unite the then independent Parliaments of Scotland and England to create one Parliament of a new United Kingdom. What really happened though was the end of the autonomy of the Scots reducing us to the status of being merely a province of England. The “parcel of rogues” he talks about were not the English though – they were the Scots who held power at the time and who were bribed into voting for this Treaty -“We’re bought and sold for English gold” – traitors to the memory of Bruce and Wallace and all they had fought for.
This is what the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 said – “Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”