Albyn or Scotland and the future

Author of ‘Contemporary Scottish Studies,’ ‘The Present
Position of Scottish Music,’ etc.

The forces that are moving towards a Scottish Renaissance are complex and at first sight incompatible. The movement began as a purely literary movement some seven or eight years ago, but of necessity speedily acquired political and then religious bearings. It is now manifesting itself in every sphere of national arts and affairs, and is at once radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary. Engaged in traversing the accepted conceptions of all things Scottish, it is in keeping that it should not have set the heather on fire. But it has made far greater headway than what has appeared about it in the English or Anglo-Scottish Press would indicate. For obvious reasons these are concerned to minimize or ignore its manifestations. The movement has had various more or less short-lived organs of its own; it will[6] undoubtedly acquire others. But in the meantime it lacks any and its progress is correspondingly obscure but none the less real. Its inception synchronized with the end of the War, and in retrospect it will be seen to have had a genesis in kin with other post-war phenomena of recrudescent nationalism all over Europe, and to have shared to the full in the wave of Catholic revivalism which accompanied them. It took the full force of the War to jolt an adequate majority of the Scottish people out of their old mental, moral and material ruts; and the full force of post-war reaction is gradually bringing them to an effective realization of their changed conditions.

At first blush there may seem little enough connection between such phenomena as the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement, the “Irish Invasion” of Scotland, and the campaign to resuscitate Braid Scots and Gaelic. But, adopting the Spenglerian philosophy, the Renaissance movement regards itself as an effort in every aspect of the national life to supplant the elements at present predominant by the other elements they have suppressed, and thus reverse the[7] existing order. Or, in terms of psychology, the effort is to relieve the inhibitions imposed by English and Anglo-Scottish influences and to inhibit in turn those factors of Scottish psychology which have rendered it amenable to the post-Union state of affairs. In closer consideration, then, it will be seen that the four phenomena mentioned correspond to pre-Union conditions in Scotland. The first takes us back beyond the demoralizing concept of the Canny Scot, which has conduced so largely to Scottish denationalization, and re-establishes a psychology in keeping with the independent traditions of the country. The majority of the Scottish Labour members returned to the House of Commons went there as “internationalists.” They were very lukewarm Home Rulers. A short experience of Westminster transformed them completely. They found the vote of the majority of the Scottish electorate systematically vetoed by an English majority, and saw how Scottish affairs were treated in the House of Commons. This saltatory emergence of a Socialist preponderance in the Scottish representation is a post-war product, and is interpreted from the[8] Renaissance point of view as a significant reassertion of the old Scottish radicalism and republicanism. Prior to the Union Scotland was always “a nest of rebels” and “never noted for loyalty to Monarchy,” and the old Scots’ Parliament, though far from being a democratic body, placed on its statute book measures of social reform in many directions in advance of any yet enacted by the Mother of Parliaments. An analysis of the difference in psychology and “direction” between the English and the Scottish Labour and Socialist movements shows that this interpretation is by no means far-fetched. The English movement is constitutional and monarchical; the Scottish revolutionary and republican.

The Scottish Home Rule movement is re-orienting itself along realist lines, and has ceased to be mainly sentimental. For the first time it is looking before as well as after. It is concerning itself less with the past and more and more with the present and the future, and its membership is growing in direct ratio to its increased practicality. Most significant of all is the fact that these developments are marked by an ascending claim.[9] It is now generally realized that no form of devolution without fiscal autonomy will meet the case, and that merely constitutional means may not suffice. Bill after Bill, backed by four out of five of the Scottish representatives of all parties, has been thrown out by the overwhelming majority of English members. This is a state of affairs which will not be tolerated indefinitely. A premium is being put upon militant effort; and the fact that the Scots National League which is out for complete independence is now growing very much more rapidly than the moderate Scottish Home Rule Association is significant in this direction. At present the nationalist Press consists of two small monthly organs; and all the daily, and practically all the weekly, papers are anti-Home Rule, just as they are all anti-Socialist, although the Scottish Socialist vote represents a third of the electorate. Scottish journalism is, therefore, almost wholly untrustworthy in relation to Scottish opinion. Realistic nationalism and the majority elements of the Labour movement solely, or at all events, predominantly concerned with bread-and-butter politics, have naturally a great[10] deal in common in the existing state of affairs, and it is not surprising that Scottish nationalism and Scottish Socialism should be making joint cause. Nor is the attitude of those Liberal and Conservative politicians who are opposing Scottish Home Rule, or modifying their interest in the subject, because it would probably mean a Scottish Socialist Government, failing to produce its own effects. Constitutionalism that fears and evades the will of the people signs its own death-warrant.

Lord Haldane recently commented on the stimulating and beneficial effects of such an admixture of races as is at present taking place in Scotland, and especially on Clydeside. There has been a tremendous “pother” about the “Irish Invasion” in certain quarters. We are told by some Protestant leaders that Scottish nationalism is in danger. This is a new-found zeal for nationalism, however, obviously dictated by emptying churches. These gentlemen represent the very factors which have been mainly responsible for the desuetude of Scottish nationalism. Their anti-Irish propaganda has been of the most unscrupulous character and[11] depends for its principal effects on the use of the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” as synonymous. But, large as the Irish influx has been, the recent rapid development of which throws an adequate light on the real motives of the protesters, representing as they do churches which are about to achieve Union, really a prelude to the inevitable re-union of the Protestant Churches and Rome, through the indifference instead of the enthusiasm of their remaining members and without consultation of the Scottish people, via a Parliament systematically anti-Scottish in its policies. From the Renaissance point of view the growth of Catholicism, and the influx of the Irish, are alike welcome, as undoing those accompaniments of the Reformation which have lain like a blight on Scottish arts and affairs. In this connection it is useful to remember that the Shorter Catechism, like the concept of the Canny Scot, the myth which has facilitated the anglicization of Scotland, was an English invention. The revival of Catholicism means the restoration of the atmosphere in which Scottish arts and letters flourished in a fashion they have far from paralleled at any time since[12] the Reformation. I am not contending that Protestantism is essentially antagonistic to arts and letters. That would be absurd. But Scottish Calvinism has been: and just as many of the great figures in the Irish literary movement have been Protestants, so, on the other hand, if there is to be cultural progress in Scotland, must many of the emerging artists be Catholics.

As to Scots, here, again, its desuetude was largely due to the Reformation and to the Union with England. Its “direction” is completely at variance with the “direction” of English; and the present state of English literature on the one hand, and the newer tendencies in Europe to which London is most antipathetic on the other, considered in conjunction with the special virtues of Scots, suggests that the psychological moment for its revival has arrived and that through it lies a way for the successful re-entry of distinctively Scottish culture into the European stream. The Burns influence has been wholly bad, producing little save puerile and platitudinous doggerel. It is necessary to go back behind Burns to Dunbar and the Old Makars—great Catholic poets using[13] the Vernacular, not for the pedestrian things to which it has latterly been confined, but for all “the brave translunary things of great art.” The younger Scottish poets are repossessing themselves of noble media and high traditions; and a splendid mystical and imaginative spirit is reuniting them over a period of five centuries with their mighty predecessors. Even the Burns cult itself, which long confined itself to an “annual guzzle” on the poet’s birthday, is now proclaiming itself a Scottish literary and patriotic organization, and advocating the teaching of Scots in the schools. And the Scottish Education Department is reported to be favourably disposed. Can the headway that has been made during the past few years be more impressively illustrated?

The Scottish Renaissance Movement is even more concerned with the revival of Gaelic than of Scots. It regards Scotland as a diversity-in-unity to be stimulated at every point, and, theoretically at any rate, it is prepared to develop along trilingual lines. Actually the revival of the Gaelic—and the output of Gaelic letters of quality, despite the efforts of the Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr, is lagging[14] behind in comparison with Braid Scots, and it is questionable whether Gaelic has any similar alignment with the “becoming tendencies” in Welt-literatur. Or it may be that the present position calls in the first place for recognition, and modern applications, of the Pictish rather than the Gaelic elements in Scottish culture. On the other hand, proposals for the establishment of a great Gaelic College have been taken up enthusiastically by the Clans Association in America, and are already well advanced. Far-reaching developments are imminent in this direction. Here again, materialism is giving way to new spiritual ideals, and in Gaelic we return closer then ever to the old Scotland.

All these movements then represent so many antitheses of the tendencies which have dominated Scotland since the Union and have conjointly driven it so far along the road to Anglicization. They are asserting themselves and have arrested the tendency to assimilate Scotland to English standards just when it seemed on the point of complete success. Lost ground is being rapidly recovered; efforts are being made once more to create[15] distinctively Scottish literature comparable in artistic quality and tendencious force to the contemporary output of other European countries, and to regain the independent cultural position of Scotland in Europe; efforts are being made to create a Scottish national drama and Scottish national music—both of which Scotland alone of European countries entirely lacks, mainly because of Calvinistic repression—and all these efforts are achieving a measure of success. Scottish genius is being liberated from its Genevan prison-house. But the centralization of British arts and affairs in London is still restricting it in ways that can only be redressed by that re-orientation of facilities which would follow the re-establishment of an independent Scottish Parliament, or, in the event of a return to the system of Provinces, a federation of assemblies. The movement cannot manifest its full stature and move freely, save within that framework of a Scotland become once again a nation in every sense of the term for which it has been designed.

In the foregoing chapter I have given an account of the movement upon which it seems to me the future of Scotland depends—or, rather, a Scottish future of Scotland. Scotland, of course, may have another future. It may become a Roman-Catholic country with a predominantly Irish population. Or its progressive anglicization and provincialization may continue until it becomes to all intents and purposes a part of its English neighbour. The latter is still the likeliest; the former has only within the past few years emerged as a serious competitor. But the main point to seize upon in the meantime is that, apart from the “Scottish Renaissance Group,” the rest of the Scottish people in Scotland to-day are not Scottish in any real sense of the term. They have no consciousness of difference except in detail; “distinctions without difference.” They are all the less Scottish in proportion to their ardour as Burns enthusiasts, members of St Andrew’s and Caledonian Societies and[17] the like. Just as the majority of Socialists become conscious of the economic causes of their plight but retain (often in an exacerbated form) the types of ideas on other matters which spring from the same source, so the vast majority of Scots to-day—even Scottish Home Rulers—regard as typically Scottish the very sentiments and attitudes which are the products of their progressive anglicization. Scotland is suffering from a very widespread inferiority complex—the result of the psychological violence suffered as a consequence of John Knox’s anti-national policy in imposing an English Bible (and, as a consequence, English as the basis of education) upon it, and of the means by which the Union of the Parliaments was encompassed and by which its inherent intention of completely assimilating Scotland to England has since been pursued. Weaker minds find compensation in a “romantic nationalism”—sedulously dissociated from politics and practical realities of every kind. The others accept the situation and transcend it; that accounts for such phenomena as Scottish Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury and[18] York, “heids of departments” of all kinds, the ubiquitous Scotsman generally, most of the Scottish aristocracy, and such writers of English as R. L. Stevenson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Norman Douglas. But these—or some of them—are only exceptions that prove the rule that the Anglo-Scottish symbiosis leads to nullity. There is a third class who are “more English than the English”—who become panicky immediately any question arises as to the benefit to Scotland of its present relationship to England, who regard everything “Scottish” as beneath contempt, and, in short, manifest all the symptoms of a “specific aboulia” in the presence of any challenge to their submerged nationalism. They have been un-Scotched and made “damned mischievous Englishmen.” The “nationalism” of the first of these three classes is such that it has been unable to create any literature, music or drama of more than a local value. It is hopelessly provincialized. The history of Scottish Vernacular poetry, for example, since the days of the Auld Makars, is a history of the progressive relinquishment of magnificent potentialities for the creation of a literature[19] which might well have rivalled the English. The only challenge to the decline was that of Allan Ramsay and Ferguson—which Burns, in the last analysis, betrayed. The influence of Burns has reduced the whole field of Scots letters to a “kailyaird.” So with music. Scottish mediæval music was ahead of English. To-day, Scotland is the only country in Western Europe which has failed to develop an art-music, though it has as available basis perhaps the finest inheritance of folk-song in the world. Scarcely any effort is being made even yet to create a national school of composers in Scotland, although the creation of such national schools in every other country in Europe—at their third and fourth stage of development now in most of them—has constituted during the past half century or so one of the greatest revolutions in music. So far as Scottish music is concerned it remains at best practically where it was in the sixteenth century. Music in Scotland is another matter. An effort is presently being made to found a Scottish Academy of Music in conjunction with a Chair of Music in Glasgow University.[20] But the title is a misnomer. It will be merely an Academy of Music in Scotland—probably under a Welshman. In his new book, Music: Classical, Romantic, and Modern, Dr Eaglefield Hull deals very succinctly with the position of Scottish music to-day. “Scotland,” he says, “the country with the loveliest scenery, the most thrilling history, a rich inheritance of literature, and hundreds of the finest love-songs in the world, has no national school of musical composition. Mac. after Mac. goes down into England and loses his musical soul for a mess of pottage! It is useless to ask whether Scotland stands where she did in music, for apart from folk-music she has no standing at all. It is indeed high time that she set to work to put her house in order. In Donald Tovey, David Stephen, Francis George Scott, Erik Chisholm, and others, there is fine material which must be utilized. But the cultivation of a School of Scottish composers can only be carried on within its own borders.” But he goes on to throw out a suggestion of no little significance. “Perhaps,” he says, “Scotland is waiting for some awakener from outside to make her thrill to a sense of her great[21] mission, such as John Field in Russia, Glinka in Spain, and Jean Aubry in England. The spark is undoubtedly there, and only needs fanning.”

Association of ideas leads me to think how the distinctively Scottish genius has manifested itself in alien fields, however inhibited it may have been at home. My main purpose here is not to discuss the lets and hindrances which have prevented the development of modern arts in Scotland, nor will my space permit me to analyse the complexities of Scottish character and circumstances responsible for our comparative failure to find expression on the higher levels of culture. But it is curious to find that in relation to the cultures of other countries, or in association with foreign elements in the constitution of the individuals concerned, Scotsmen, or half-Scotsmen have, with a surprising consistency, continued to manifest elements distinctively Scottish which clearly relate them to the Auld Makars, to the ballad makers, to our mediæval Scots musicians, and to that elusive but unmistakable thread of continuity which attaches the work of Norman Douglas, for example, to that of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator[22] of Rabelais. Wergeland, the Norwegian poet, was conscious of the idiosyncratic power of the Scottish blood in his veins. So was a greater poet—the Russian Lermontov. So was Hermann Melville; so—to take a living example—is Walter de la Mare, whose diablerie, the finest element in his work, is probably attributable to his Scottish blood, as, in his case, were some of Browning’s amusing tortuosities and prepossession with dialectical excesses. This Scottish strain is tremendously idiosyncratic, full of a wild humour which blends the actual and the apocalyptic in an incalculable fashion. In his able analysis of the complexities of the Scottish genius Professor Gregory Smith has called it “the Caledonian antisyzygy”—a baffling zig-zag of contradictions—and he traces it down the centuries in a most interesting fashion, remarking that “There is more in this Scottish antithesis of the real and fantastic than is to be explained by the familiar rules of rhetoric. This mingling, even of the most eccentric kind, is an indication to us that the Scot, in that mediæval fashion which takes all things as granted, is at his ease in both ‘rooms of life,’ and[23] turns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings. For Scottish literature is more mediæval in habit than criticism has suspected, and owes some part of its picturesque strength to this freedom in passing from one mood to another. It takes some people more time than they can spare to see the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint.” And Professor Gregory Smith goes on to express the opinion that this incalculable Scottish spirit will continue to survive in English arts and letters pretty much as a dancing mouse may manifest itself in a family of orthodox rodents—as something disparate, an ornament, or an excrescence, but irreconciliable to any major tradition and incapable of affording a basis for any higher synthesis of the Scottish genius.

That may be; on the other hand, its expansion may await a conjunction of conditions which have not yet arisen. It has affiliations to the baroque and the rococo, and evidences are not lacking of a widespread renewal of interest in these modes. But a more important fact is that this complicated wildness of imagination is, in Scots literature,[24] associated with a peerless directness of utterance

The language of the Greeks is simple and concrete, without clichés or rhetoric. English is, by contrast, loose and vague. But what Greek epigram has a more magical simplicity than Burns’s

or where shall a parallel be found for the terrific concision, the vertiginous speed, of Tam o’ Shanter? The future of the Scots spirit may depend upon the issue of the great struggle going on in all the arts between the dying spirit of the Renaissance and the rediscovered spirit of nationality. To-day there is a general reaction against the Renaissance. Observe the huge extent to which dialect is entering into the stuff of modern literature in every country. Dialect is the language of the common people; in literature it denotes an almost overweening attempt to express the here-and-now. That, in its principle, is anti-Renaissance.[25] Basil de Sélincourt[1] and many others observe that modern English shows signs of fatigue in comparison with Chaucer’s. Chaucer was a poet with this power of plain speech. He never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and hens is not, some people have thought, a poetic subject; Chaucer knew better. Dunbar with the aid of Scots achieved effects beyond Chaucer’s compass with an utterance even more simple and straightforward. It has been said that Dunbar had for his highest quality a certain unique intensity of feeling, the power of expressing that passionate and peculiar force which distinguishes and differentiates us people of the North from our Southern neighbours. What is this unique intensity of feeling, this power of direct utterance, but the pre-Renaissance qualities of which I am writing? Braid Scots is a great untapped repository of the pre-Renaissance or anti-Renaissance potentialities which English has progressively forgone.

[1] See his Pomona: or the Future of English, in this series.

But it goes far deeper than language, this “Caledonian antisyzygy,” and music in the long run may utilize it more fully and finely than literature. It is here that I join issue again with my essential theme—to find what I have said concerning the persistence of this queer Scots strain extraordinarily exemplified in modern music in the work of Erik Satie. Satie’s middle name was Leslie; his mother was a Scotswoman. Satie was a “musical joker.” His most distinctive and important work was a species of fantastic experimental clowning, hardening later into satire. His work and his methods should have the special consideration of every Scottish artist—every musician in particular—who is puzzled as to how he may profitably exploit the peculiarities of Scottish psychology of which he is[27] conscious. Paul Landormy calls him “a freakish musician, more inventor than creator, the composer of ‘Pieces in the Form of a Pear,’ of the ‘Bureaucratic Sonata,’ and other fantastic products of a whimsical yet quite elegantly witty imagination,” but—and this is the vital thing—he admits that “he furnished certain elements of that new language which the composer of Pelleas used for loftier ends.” This is no little understatement of Satie’s significance. Dr Eaglefield Hull says: “This kind of musical irony is the most individual and personal of all types of art. The composer writes for a few detached individual people, who would scoff at the rest of humanity. Only very ‘superior’ people can appreciate such irony, which passes from an elegant wit to a brutal sarcasm.” But he goes on to say: “Historically Satie was of immense importance. The music on Satie’s twelve pages (of his first work, Sarabandes, 1887) is even a greater landmark than either Debussy’s or Chabrier’s work. The ‘diaphony’ of his sevenths and ninths was to become part and parcel of the harmonic decoration of Debussy and the[28] Impressionists.... He was the father of atonality in music. Side by side with all his strangeness and boldness are passages of the most amazing commonplaces, which are difficult to explain except as satirical allusions.” Exactly! What is this but the “Caledonian Antisyzygy” precisely as Professor Gregory Smith describes it, but manifesting itself in modern music to ultimately triumphant effect. There is no need, then, for Dr Hull to say “His father was French and his mother Scottish. We wonder to which source his outstanding characteristic of humour is due.” Surely it is along similar lines in Scotland itself that our difficult national characteristics may yet be turned to musical account and make the basis of a new technique, at once completely modern yet intimately related to the whole history of Scots psychology and conjoining in the closest fashion the artists we are about to become, if the Scottish Renaissance realizes its objectives, with the Auld Makars and the ballad makers whose achievements we have yet to parallel and continue.

As with literature and music so with[29] drama and dancing this tale might be continued. The explanations of Scotland’s leeway lie in the Reformation, the Union with England and the Industrial Revolution. If I isolate the second of these as the main cause, it is because it was indispensable to the consummation and continuance of the first and largely determined the effect upon Scotland of the third. There are people who imagine that but for the Union with England Scotland would still be destitute of all the blessings of modern civilization. They find no difficulty in associating this belief with the idea that Scotsmen are thrifty, hardworking, exceptionally well-educated, law-abiding and home-loving. I am not one of them. I believe that the Industrial Revolution would have spread to Scotland much less injuriously if England had suddenly disappeared about 1700. I believe that the concept of the “canny Scot” is the myth (as M. Delaisi puts it) which has made Scotland governable by England and has prevented the development since the Union of any realistic nationalism worth speaking about. True, it has been so insidiously and incessantly imposed that the great majority of Scots[30] have long been unable for all practical purposes to do other than believe it themselves. Yet there are notable exceptions; the traditions of Highland soldiering, for example—the “ladies from Hell.” Even the “canniest” Scot does not repudiate these as un-Scottish. At all events the effect of all these three causes was overwhelmingly repressive and anti-Scottish. The Reformation, which strangled Scottish arts and letters, subverted the whole national psychology and made the dominant characteristics of the nation those which had previously been churl elements. The comparative cultural sterility of the latter is undeniable. A premium was put upon Philistinism. There has been no religious poetry—no expression of “divine philosophy”—in Scotland since the Reformation. As a consequence Scotland to-day is singularly destitute of æsthetic consciousness. The line of hope lies partially in re-Catholicization, partially in the exhaustion of Protestantism. The Union with England confirmed and secured the effects of the Reformation. It intensified the anglicization that the introduction of an English Bible and the Shorter Catechism (with[31] which England itself so promptly dispensed) had initiated. It progressively severed the Scottish people from their past. The extent to which this has gone is almost incredible—especially if taken in conjunction with the general attribution of an uncommon love-of-country to the Scots. English has practically vanquished Scots (which is not a dialect but a sister language to English, with different but not inferior, and, in some ways, complementary, potentialities) and Gaelic. There is very little Scottish Education in Scotland to-day. The type of international education which is everywhere gaining ground to-day is that which seeks to perfect, and even to intensify, different cultures already existent among different peoples, and sets for its ideal that each people has, first, the right to its own interpretation of life; and, second, the duty of understanding, and sympathizing with, the different interpretations given by its neighbours as fully as possible. Back of this type of international education lies the belief that differentiation in matters of culture is more valuable to life than a stereotyped homogeneity. This, so far as Scotland is concerned, is the aim[32] and object of the Scottish Renaissance movement; and it is high time that the Scottish Educational System was attempting to change-over to this type of education rather than adhering partly to the imperialistic and partly to the eclectic types, both of which, as Professor Zimmern says, “belong rather to the past than to the present,” except, alas, in Scotland, which once prided itself on leading the world in matters of education. A recent Committee of Enquiry, set up by the Glasgow branch of the Educational Institute of Scotland, reports that no school-book dealing with Scottish history is of a satisfactory character. This, although a remarkable advance in professional admission, is a sheer understatement. Scottish history is only now in the process of being rediscovered and, once the labours of the new school of Scottish historical researchers come to be synthetized, it will be found that even such comparatively “Scottish” Scottish Histories as Hume Brown’s have to be thrown overboard, as little more than a mass of English propaganda. It is only within recent years that any attempt has been made to teach even such “Scottish[33] history” in Scottish schools, and then subsidiarily to English, and, as it were, as a make-weight or after-thought—to the older children. Scots literature is in even worse case, although here, too, there has been a slight improvement during the past decade. The increasing—if still insignificant—Scoticization of Scottish Education during recent years is, of course, not a product of the propaganda of the Scottish Renaissance Group. To what is it attributable? How can it be accounted for if the policy of England and, even more determinedly, of Anglo-Scotland, let alone the over-riding tendency of modern industrialism, is towards the complete assimilation of Scotland to England? In my opinion it is a product partly of the latent criticism of the industrial order and partly of a realization of the cultural exhaustion of English (vide “Pomona”)—an instinctive protective re-assembling of the forces suppressed by the existing order of things which has made for the predominancy of English. This explanation accords with the doctrine Spengler expounds in his Downfall of the Western World. “The Caledonian Antisyzygy,” instead of being[34] a disparate thing destined to play a baroque, ornamental, or disfiguring rôle—chacun à son goût—in English literature may be awaiting the exhaustion of the whole civilization of which the latter is a typical product in order to achieve its effective synthesis in a succeeding and very different civilization. In the history of civilization therefore the sudden suppression of Scots, with all its unique expressive qualities may prove to have been a providential postponement; it may have been driven underground to emerge more triumphantly later. Its coming musicians and writers must address themselves to it, as Mussorgsky, following Dargomisky’s dictum that “the sound must express the word,” addressed himself to Russian—with Mallarmé’s “adoration for the property of words”; just as they must recollect that the “pure poetry” of some of the contemporary Continental expressionists was anticipated and carried far further long ago in their Canntaireachd, or mnemonic notation of the MacCrimmons—a basis upon which they may profitably build. To detail the arguments in support of this “theory of Scots letters” would take up more[35] space than I can afford; but I must interpolate a brief outline of them here, for they bear in one way and another on all the issues with which I am concerned.

III

Not Burns—Dunbar! That is the phrase which sums up the significant tendency which is belatedly manifesting itself in Scots poetry to-day. At first it may seem absurd to try to recover at this time of day the literary potentialities of a language which has long ago disintegrated into dialects. These dialects even at their richest afford only a very restricted literary medium, capable of little more than kailyard usages, but quite incapable of addressing the full range of literary purpose. They are the disjecta membra of a language; the question is, whether they can be re-integrated and re-vitalized. Can these dry bones live? Like feats have at all events been accomplished elsewhere—in regard to Provençal[36] in France, Catalan in Spain, the Landsmaal in Norway, and so on. Those who would try it in Scots must first of all recover for themselves the full canon of Scots used by the Auld Makars and readapt it to the full requirements of modern self-expression. This is no easy task. Why should it be attempted? One answer is because English is incapable of affording means of expression for certain of the chief elements of Scottish psychology—just as English has no equivalents for many of the most distinctive words in the Scots vocabulary. Another answer is that there is a tendency in world-literature to-day which is driving writers of all countries back to obsolete vocabularies and local variants and specialized usages of language of all kinds. This is not the place to more than indicate considerations such as these. Suffice it to say that a little group of Scottish writers to-day are alive to them and conscious of an overwhelming impulse to return more deeply “into the pit whence we were digged” than any Scot has felt impelled to go for several centuries. Burns, although he used a certain amount of synthetic Scots of his own, not sticking[37] to any one dialect and recovering words that had ceased to be used, did not know the works of his great fifteenth-century predecessors well enough to make anything like full use of the linguistic material available. This is what makes Carlyle say that if Burns had been “a first-class intellectual workman he might have changed the whole course of literature.” That opportunity still remains open, however, for anyone who can revive the potentialities of the Scots language manifested in Dunbar and since then almost wholly forgone in favour of the very different potentialities of English.

The effect of Burns’ work on Scots poetry is well-known. It has reduced it to a level that is beneath contempt. Little or no poetry that has been produced in Scots since Burns’ day has been of a quality to support comparison for a moment with the average of contemporary poetry in any other European country. It is all of the kailyard kind; sentimental, moralizing, flatfooted, and with little or no relation to reality. I have suggested in the preface to my selection of Burns’ work in Benn’s Augustan Poets that critical revaluation of Burns is overdue—or[38] has, perhaps, been tacitly accomplished—except by Burnsians and anthologists. Perhaps poetry-lovers have carried the winnowing process too far. Reacting from hackneyed favourites, and immune from the Burns cult, they have not troubled to go over his work again—still less considered it from the standpoint of what is best by Scottish, if not by English, standards. Much of the best, and least known, of Burns depends for appreciation on a thorough knowledge of Scots. This is its “growing end.” His poetry in English is wholly negligible, and of his work as a whole it may be said that it rises in poetic value the further away from English it is, and the stronger the infusion of Scots he employs.

But it is not a question of language only but of content. A great deal of Burns’ work is eighteenth-century conventionalism of a deplorable kind. Most of his love-songs have a deadly sameness. The task of Scottish poetry to-day is to rise out of the rut in which it has so long been confined. It is here that the return to Dunbar is of the utmost value. It means that Scots poetry may be rescued at last from the atmosphere of hopeless[39] anachronism which has long kept it so “fushionless.” It has been said that if Burns is the heart, Dunbar is the head, of Scottish poetry: and certainly at any time during the past century Scots literature has had desperate need to pray Meredith’s prayer for “More brains, O Lord, more brains.” Dunbar is in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets, whereas all but a fraction of Burns’ work (and that fraction by no means confined to the most generally known portion of it) is irrevocably dated and almost indistinguishable from the ruck of imitations of it to which Scots poets have so largely confined themselves during the subsequent century and a half. Even Professor Gregory Smith admits that “there cannot be any quarrel about the richness of the Scottish vocabulary, its frequent superiority to English in both the spiritual and technical matters of poetic diction, its musical movement and suggestion, and, generally, what have been called the ‘grand accommodations’ in the craft of writing as well.” Intelligent young Scots a few years ago might very well have been excused for failing to detect any of these great qualities in[40] the very inferior types of Scots literature they came into contact with. Scottish children are only taught a little Burns and a few of the ballads. They are not taught anything of the Auld Makars. For the most part their attention is confined to English literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that they should regard Scottish literature as a mere side-line, and that, in consequence, Scottish literature should lose the greater part of those who should be contributing to it rather than to a foreign literature, which, in any case, prefers its own sons and daughters. But with the re-discovery of Dunbar in particular by young Scottish poets during the past few years new possibilities have opened up. They realize now upon what grounds testimony is borne to the richness and resource of the Scots language. In Dunbar they see them displayed in a way far beyond anything accomplished since. They see Scots allied to noble ideas, high imaginings, “divine philosophy,” and no longer confined to the foothills of Parnassus, and when they resurvey the problem of the revival of Scots from that angle, many of the difficulties of readjusting and utilizing[41] it to serious literary purpose which have hitherto proved baffling are dispelled. Most of the people who are trying to revive the Doric are, at the same time, trying to maintain its “pawkiness,” its “canniness,” its kailyardism and so forth—in a word, they are trying to revive Scots and yet remain within the stream of tendency responsible for its progressive decay. It would be truer to say that it is Braid Scots—not Scots—with which they are concerned. Their method is that of exact dialectical demarcation—they do not believe in mixing dialects—they contemplate no synthesis. What alienates the young creative writers, conscious of the inadequacy of their purpose alike of English and of what has still any currency as Scots, from the Vernacular Circle people is precisely that the latter have anything but a literary purpose. Not one of them is capable or desirous of envisaging the creative potentialities of Scots or sufficiently involved in questions of literary technique and tendency to appreciate that so far as the literary outcome of what they are professing to attempt goes it must depend, not only on intuitions in profound harmony[42] with the phonetic and expressive genius of Scots, but also in effective relation with some major tendency in European literary evolution. If there is to be further writing in Scots these people want it to be as like what has gone before it from Burns’ time as possible: otherwise they will be the first to condemn it as un-Scottish. But they are not caring much about further writing in Scots at all; they want to maintain the Burns cult and the cult of such lesser lights as Tannahill, and “Johnny Gibb o’ Gushetneuk.” Any Scottish aspirant worth a bawbee is bound to recognize that this is hopeless. The Vernacular Circle is a “vicious circle.” No revival of Scots can be of consequence to a literary aspirant worthy of his salt unless it is so aligned with contemporary tendencies in European thought and expression that it has with it the possibility of eventually carrying Scots work once more into the mainstream of European literature. The re-discovery of Dunbar can solve the difficulty for every would-be Scots writer who stands divided between his reluctance to go over bag and baggage to English literature and his inability to rise above[43] the Kailyaird level through the medium of Kailyaird Scots. Dunbar stands at the opposite pole of the Scottish genius from Burns. The latter has ruled the roost far longer than it is healthy for any literature to be dominated by a single influence. It is time, and more than time, for a swing of the pendulum which, if it carries us back over the centuries to Dunbar, may also regain for Scots literature some measure, at all events, of the future that was foregone at Flodden.

It is the possibility and increasing probability of such a swing of the pendulum that Mr G. M. Thomson seems to me to have disregarded in his cogent, but far too pessimistic, essay on Caledonia: or the Future of the Scots in this series. But I am at one with him in regard to the desperate state of Scottish arts and affairs to-day and in the absence of such developments as I indicate and their timely expression in an effective form, my anticipations could not materially differ from his. His melancholy outlook is due to his failure to recognize that the Scottish Home Rule Association, the Scots National League, the Scottish National Movement, the Scottish National[44] Convention, the Scotland’s Day Committee, the Scottish Renaissance Group and other bodies fully realize the position he describes, and have been making marked headway during the past two or three years. Mr Thomson’s reference to the Porpoise Press (which has done excellent work) does not excuse his failure to give credit to The Scottish Chapbook, The Scottish Nation, The Northern Review, The Scots Independent, Scottish Home Rule, Guth na Bliadna, and other organs which, severally and jointly, have been of far greater consequence in this redevelopment of cultural and political nationalism. Nor—otherwise accurate as is his account of Scotland’s industrial plight—can he be excused for failing to realize the significance of the electrification policy. Scotland would never have been selected for this purpose if it had been so destitute of an industrial future as surface appearances suggest. The North of England is suffering in many respects just as Scotland is doing, but Mr Thomson should have realized the import of the map on the cover of The Northern Review, which showed not only Scotland but England as far down as Hull and Liverpool. The[45] country between the Humber-Mersey line and the Forth and Clyde line corresponds to the old Brythonic kingdom. This is our real centre of gravity. Most of our heavy industries are centred there—most of our mineral wealth—and statistics show that an overwhelming percentage of Scottish and English genius alike of all kinds has come from that area. Politics have led to an extraordinary distortion; but there can be little doubt that economic realities will yet redress the balance as between London, on the one hand, and that area on the other, and in effect endorse the Southward policy of the old Scots Kings. In any case there is still an ample Scottish population in Scotland to redevelop the essential nationalism—if they can be aroused to a recognition of the necessity of it and, with the support of the international tendencies to which I have referred (which in turn they would strengthen), avert the calamity he indicates. The calamity, however, is imminent; and all but a moiety of the people are unconscious of its imminence or indifferent. The conscious minority has, perhaps still a decade in which to develop a “Scottish Idea” complementary[46] to Dostoevsky’s “Russian Idea” (Dostoevsky’s mistake was to imagine that Russia alone could prevent the robotization of Europe) and in so doing to demonstrate that Professor Denis Saurat divined aright the larger hope of the Scottish Renaissance Movement when he wrote that in achieving its immediate objectives it might do more—it might save Europe. It is significant that Spengler, and Laurie Magnus in his Dictionary of European Literature, both look to “one of the smaller countries” with a similar hope. But, as Saurat says, to “burn what we have hitherto adored” is the pre-requisite of such a Scottish Renaissance.

With increasing frequency there is a paragraph in the Scottish papers—more particularly the local papers, not the “national” organs—telling how a debate on the question of Home Rule for Scotland has been held here or there, and, almost[47] invariably, the paragraph ends with the statement that, on a vote being taken, there was a large majority in favour of it. That is to say a majority of that small minority who attend meetings. No one who is in the habit of going up and down the country and coming into varied contact with the public can fail to observe that more and more are inclined to the movement with a sympathy which has greatly intensified within the past few years. These are they, in my opinion, who “feel in their bones” the larger issues of which I have been speaking, but have not yet developed more than a political reaction to them. Observers of very different shades of political opinion agree that the time is ripening for a new political nationalism, as part and parcel of a general national awakening. There is little agreement, however, as to how this widespread latent feeling may be crystallized, in the best interests of Scotland and the wider interests inevitably involved. Partial views, and partial solutions, abound; but none of these proffered precipitants are powerful enough to act on more than a small proportion of the flux of opinion that is[48] obviously awaiting effective re-direction. What is it that intervenes in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, to prevent the sympathetic Scotsman from giving any practical effect to his feelings on such a matter?

Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sentiment strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs—a failure inconsistent alike with our traditional love of country and reputation for practicality. The reason probably lies in the fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complexity of our national life. For it must be recognized that the absence of Scottish nationalism is, paradoxically enough, a form of Scottish self-determination. If that self-determination, which, in the opinion of many of us, has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass, is to be induced to take a different form and express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading programme[49] must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long ensured the opposite process. Scottish opinion is anachronism-proof in matters of this kind. The tendency inherent in the Union, to assimilate Scotland to England, and ultimately to provincialize the former—the stage which has been so unexpectedly but unmistakably arrested at the eleventh hour—has, as a matter of fact, not yet been effectively countered by the emergence of any principle demanding a reversed tendency. That is why, despite the persistence in Scotland of an entirely different psychology, the desire to retain and develop distinctive traditions in arts and affairs, and the fairly general recognition that the political, economic and social consequences of the Union have never been by any means wholly favourable to Scottish interests and have latterly, in many ways, become decreasingly so to a very alarming degree, there has nevertheless been at most little more than a passive resistance to complete assimilation masked by an external acquiescence. This is because Home Rule has been conceived for the most part, even by its advocates, merely[50] as a measure of devolution—a continuance of substantially the same thing as prevails at Westminster; not something fundamentally different and answering to the unexpressed needs of the Scottish spirit. It is this passive resistance which accounts, for example, for the comparative paucity and poverty of distinctively Scottish literature since the Union. Only that fringe of the Scottish genius amenable to Anglicization has continued to find expression; the rest has, practically, “held its tongue,” and, to a large extent, its powers of expression have atrophied. A similar phenomenon manifests itself in our schools. Many teachers tell me that the children’s abilities to express themselves, and, behind that, to think, are largely suppressed by official insistence upon the use of “correct English.” They actually think, and could express themselves a great deal more readily and effectively, in dialect. This tenacity of Scots in the life of our people is extraordinary. Observe the way even “educated people” lapse into it on convenient occasions, or when they are genuinely moved. To ban it from our schools is, therefore, a psychological[51] outrage. A distinctive speech cannot be so retained in the intimate social life, in the thinking of a people without an accompanying subterranean continuance of all manner of distinctive mental states and potentialities. The inhibition of these is all the worse when, as in Scotland to-day, they are denied their natural pabulum—when, for example, as so often happens, an appeal to Scottish sentiment is applauded by those who, owing to the way in which our educational system has been organized, have little or no knowledge of our separate history and culture, and have been taught to take it for granted that Scotland’s future is wholly identified with England’s, and that economic and social expediency are best served by discarding the shibboleths of “a distinction without a difference.” It is upon these camouflaged or hidden forces, however—many of them unconscious—that the ultimate direction, if it has any, of “Scotland—a Nation,” must depend. Only so can Scotland, as such, re-enter the mainstream of European arts and affairs. This reservoir of “difference” has not yet been tapped by any of our Scottish nationalist movements;[52] few, indeed, have realized its existence or made it their objective. That is why they have been so ineffective. But latterly there has been a significant change. Its promise lies in the fact that it is not limited to Scotland, but, as Dr J. M. Bulloch has said, is a world-movement, naturally becoming specially well-defined in Scotland, to “set up a resistance to the efforts, many of them due to mechanisms and not a few to political theories, to make us all of one mind.” It is manifesting itself in many diverse ways—not yet co-ordinated into a comprehensive reversal of the general tendency it is arresting.

The recent Scottish breaks-away from English domination in regard to such widely-separated interests as the lifeboat service and the protection of birds are straws which show the way the wind is blowing. Cultural forces have manifested themselves and demonstrated the timeliness, if not the necessity, of specifically Scottish developments in relation to the European situation as a whole. Religious forces are now manifesting themselves. The “Irish invasion” may be the “point of departure.” Happily it is already[53] clear that we have here far more, and far other, than (as Dr G. F. Barbour puts it) “the ominous beginnings of a form of controversy from which Scotland has long been free—that regarding religious education.” Art and religion—if these two are being nationalistically stirred, we have the conditions we have hitherto lacked for the re-creation of a dynamic Scottish nationalism. These are factors of incalculably greater power than those which have already produced the meagre and ineffective phenomena of Scottish nationalism since the Union—and factors leading right back into that “reservoir of indifference” of which I have spoken. It is not surprising to find, with the emergence of significant developments in these two great fields of consciousness, a simultaneous leap in the membership of the political nationalist societies. That membership has more than trebled itself within two years. And the measure of autonomy which is being contended for has increased proportionately. So long as Scottish Home Rule was regarded as, more or less, an end in itself, it was incapable of attracting a sufficient measure of active support to demonstrate[54] the falsity of calling it—as most of the papers persist in calling it—“the absurd demand of a handful of fanatics.”

There is a time-factor in all these things. The discoveries which have recently revolutionized physical science are due to a strain of “heresy” in mathematics, long ridiculed and sterile, but now come to its own as the medium of stupendous discoveries the heretics themselves never anticipated in their wildest dreams. The position in regard to Scottish Nationalism to-day is not dissimilar. A form of Scottish Home Rule would probably ultimately have been granted, if for no other reason than the congestion of business at Westminster—a matter of mere administrative convenience; and the present attempt to destroy the last vestiges of Scottish control of Scottish affairs by the wholesale transference of Departments to London is probably due to the realization that this goal, which was almost within grasp, is unaccountably receding. It would have made for greater efficiency, and, temporarily, for economy—but it would not have been utilizable for the deeper purposes I have indicated. On the contrary it would have represented[55] the last step in the assimilation of Scotland to England. Scottish Home Rule Societies in the past have sought little more; and have encountered, in Scotland, the overwhelming objection to a “glorified County Council.” The deep intuitions of the people were right. The time had not come. All the bills hitherto promoted to give Scotland this or that measure of self-government have been inadequate means to the ends in reserve. Has the time come now? Unlike any of its predecessors the latest Draft Bill is “nation-size” and in significant alignment, if only in the steepening of its demands, with those profounder stirrings of the national consciousness to which “mere politics” are comparatively irrelevant, although in the last analysis they may be dependent upon them, as the big things in life often are upon the little.

The Bill as an end in itself would still be of little consequence perhaps; but as a means to steadily emerging ends which cannot yet be clearly defined, but which it is obviously anticipating and likely to facilitate, it is on a different plane. And its promoters cannot realize too clearly[56] that, as Charles Maurras has said, “The man of action is but a workman whose art consists in taking advantage of the lucky chances. All politics come back to this art of lying in wait for the combinazione, the happy chance. A moment always comes when the problem of success is a question of insight, and reduces itself to a search for what our Ancients called junctura rerum, the place where the bony structure bends, though it is rigid elsewhere, the place where the spring of the action will play.” Success may be unexpectedly near, and stupendous in its sequelæ.

In the meantime the extirpation of “a Scottish accent” in the Scottish schools continues almost unabated, although, as Lady Margaret Sackville says, and as the cultural poverty of post-Union Scotland amply attests, “language imposed mechanically upon a people without[57] understanding of their peculiar ways of thought can only be stultifying; and it is an impertinence to substitute a pert, half-baked, and complacent education for the very ancient culture which the Vernacular represents. Let education rather work hand in hand with this culture and humbly learn from it to its own great gain.” But the general attitude to England, and Scotland’s relation to it, is far deeper, and for the most part other than mere “protective mimicry.” Apart from the claim to which I have referred there is a widespread reluctance to think about the matter—to discuss it in any way. No probable, perhaps no possible, development of Scots Nationalism could lead to a complete disjunction of the two countries; or preclude their remaining parts of the British Empire. Opponents of Scottish Home Rule, of course, generally argue that such a measure would be a piece of retrogressive parochialism at variance with the part we are called upon to play as citizens of a great Empire. Especially is this argument being used against the newer forms which that demand is taking. The reason for this is that they represent[58] that growth or rebirth of national sentiment in Scotland in recent years, which has brought with it the increasing realization that any measure of devolution which does not carry with it full financial autonomy is not worth having. Besides, the powers granted to the Irish Free State render it impossible, as derogatory to its historical status as a nation, that Scotland should accept any less. The latest Draft Bill meets these considerations, and is thus a far more advanced measure than any of its eleven predecessors. A typical comment runs as follows: “The Old ‘Home Rulers,’ while they aimed at autonomy for the management of the strictly domestic business of Scotland, jealously safeguarded Scotland’s position in the United Kingdom and the Empire. Nothing was more repugnant to them than the idea that the country should cease to have its full representation in the Imperial Parliament. In the new Bill that ceases, and Scotland in nearly everything but a joint interest in the armed forces becomes detached and isolated; and provision appears to be made for the severance at some future time of even this link.... It is a reversal of[59] the whole process of constitutional progress which governs British history.” This is the generally accepted view. But—apart from the fact that Great Britain occupies an altogether disproportionately important place in the Empire which the growth of the other elements must drastically correct in time—it is, nevertheless, completely at variance with the history and present prospects of our constitutional evolution. So far from being a reversal of the process of constitutional progress which governs British history, it is a fresh and salutary manifestation of it, and constitutional experts are increasingly realizing and proclaiming that it is only by a general extension and speeding-up of this process that the Empire can be maintained and prevented from sharing the fate of all the other great centralized Empires of the past. “Empire,” as a matter of fact, is now a misnomer; the term ought rather to be the “British Association of Free Peoples.” Upon the development of the utmost freedom of each and the inter-relations with each other of the various elements in this great diversity-in-unity the future of the “Empire” depends.

This point of view is admirably expressed by Viscount Dunedin, who says: “The secret of the tie that unites the Empire—the rock on which it is built—is the autonomy of local law. And not merely local law, but autonomy of local law making—in other words—legislation.” And he pointed out that the Privy Council had been more solicitous of the principle of legislative autonomy than the Dominions themselves. The Scottish Home Rule demand is, therefore, strictly in accord with the very life-spirit of the Empire, and it is the attempt to assimilate Scottish law and legislation to English and to secure uniformity, instead of permitting the free development of inherent diversity in accordance with distinctive national genius that is anti-Imperial.

The opponents of the new Draft Bill cannot have it both ways. The same type of people have objected to all the previous bills on the ground that these would only result in transforming Scotland into a “glorified County Council.” It is the realization of the truth of this that has prompted the greater demand embodied in the present Bill. Without[61] the power of the purse a Scottish Parliament would, indeed, have been a mere glorified County Council, and such a measure would have completed, instead of reversing, the shameful provincialization of our country.

The Empire not only stands in no danger from Scotland coming into line with the other component parts of it, but it will give Scotland for the first time an effective say and share in Imperial affairs. Scotland has contributed far too much to the upbuilding of the Empire to want to withdraw from it. It is, indeed, the very opposite motive that is at work. It is the recognition of how grossly anomalous it is that Scotland, which has contributed so preponderantly to Imperial development, should be relegated to so inferior and ineffective a place in it, and have no voice in determining and disposing its future. Scotland has been placed at an intolerable disadvantage in this connection compared with almost every other part of the Empire, and the newer developments of autonomy in the Dominions are relegating Scotland to a more and more subordinate rôle, entirely out of keeping with its due as one of the[62] great founder nations of the Empire. The new Bill is designed to rectify matters and accord to Scotland its due place in the economy of the Empire. Under it, Scotland will re-acquire a real part in relation to Imperial and world-affairs. At present it has no effective part in either. The constitution of the House of Commons is such that the Scottish vote is subject to the perpetual veto of the English majority, although English political psychology is profoundly different from Scottish and the economic conditions and requirements of Scotland profoundly different from those of England. Scotland, to-day, has no effective representation anywhere—on the Imperial Conference, on the League of Nations, on Inter-Parliamentary Delegations and on any of the other great international bodies which are playing rôles of cumulative importance in world-affairs: but, given a distinctive place again, there is every reason to hope that this old historical nation, which once occupied so notable a place in Europe, and which has been one of the main sources of our Imperial power, may again play a part proportionate to its[63] past and in keeping with its particular genius.

What is commonly forgotten, too, in matters of this kind, is that Scotland itself is part of the Empire. A concern with Scottish domestic welfare is just as much an Imperial consideration as preoccupation with the affairs of any other part of the Empire. The welfare of the Empire depends upon the welfare of each of its component parts. Scotsmen may help the Empire best by keeping the heart of it—the source of much that is best in it—sound at home. Surely it cannot be contended that Imperial policy demands the dereliction of Scotland? Will it not serve the Empire best in the future, as it has done in the past, if Scotland can once again become the home of a vigorous and multiplying people from which the Colonies overseas can continue to draw robust settlers? The idea that Scottish Home Rule is at variance with Imperial tendencies and requirements is, in fact, an erroneous and short-sighted one, while the contrary opinion is supported by the recollection of the great part Scotland has played in Imperial affairs in the past—and cannot, assuredly, continue to play if its[64] population is to be decimated, its industries ruined, and its countryside depopulated and thrown out of cultivation. Yet the latter is the effect of the neglect of Scottish affairs which is the settled—and natural—policy of the overwhelmingly English House of Commons. It represents a greater menace to the Empire than any Separatist movement can ever become because it strikes at the very heart of Imperial strength. The present policy of encouraging emigration in regard to Scotland is nothing more or less than a killing by our overseas dominions of the goose which has hitherto laid many of the best clutches of their golden eggs.

Let me add here that Scotland is not only the most neglected country in Europe to-day, but the most highly taxed. A vehicular and passenger bridge across the Forth is refused to Scotland by Englishmen, but Scots must contribute towards the £7,000,000 or £8,000,000 granted for a bridge across the Thames. Scotland’s housing is a disgrace to Western civilization, although Scots builders are such efficient workmen that they are welcomed in England and[65] overseas. Scotland has the highest death-rate, the highest sickness-rate, and the highest infant mortality rate in the British Isles, although naturally it is no less healthy than England, Ireland or Wales. Scotland contains 2,000,000 acres of land which are certified as suitable for cultivation and small holdings, although during the last ten years her agricultural population decreased by 15,000. There are fewer small holdings in Scotland now than in 1911, when the Small Landholders Act was passed by the London Parliament. Like facts can be adduced in regard to every other aspect of Scottish affairs. They are the inevitable counterparts of her cultural declinature. Verily “Without the Vision the people perish.”

Several reviewers of the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher’s biography of the late Viscount Bryce have expressed their[66] surprise that Bryce had not at least some measure of practical success with his first legislative love, the Bill to give free access to Scottish mountains and moors. As one of them well remarked, “Forty years ago there was no more popular measure. The mention of it on a public platform never failed to jog a lackadaisical audience into enthusiasm. How thankful many a Liberal orator felt that he could wind up by declaring his ‘whole-hearted concurrence in principle and in part with that measure sponsored by the Member for South Aberdeen, which would give the people of Scotland freedom to enjoy their health-giving heritage.’ It was a measure easy to advocate and difficult to oppose, even in the days before the motor car had driven the pedestrian from the by-ways as well as the highways. But to this day not one practical step in its realization has been taken; there is still no legal access to Scottish mountains and moors.”

It is, indeed, one of the most curious of all puzzles in political psychology. Of the reality of the need for it, and of the abundance of public support, there is no question. Why, then, is nothing done?[67] Whoever can answer that question can explain the whole position of Scotland to-day. It is not enough that a measure should be clamantly called for by the needs of the Scottish situation; it is not enough that the mere mention of it should be sufficient to jog the most apathetic body of Scottish electors into enthusiasm; it is not enough that it should have the support of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish M.P.s of all parties. All these three considerations can be fulfilled, and have been fulfilled, in respect to Scottish Home Rule and other questions, and yet not only is nothing at all done, but the proposed solution never even emerges into what is known as “the sphere of practical politics.” Why is this?

But, whatever the reason, it is obviously not to the credit of the Scots M.P.s and their constituents that such measures should have to be supinely forgone; the realities of the Scottish national position treated as unrealities while the catch-vote tactics of professional politics are permitted to monopolize public and Parliamentary attention; and the whole principle of democracy in[68] regard to Scottish affairs stultified in this obscure but overwhelming fashion. Somehow or other the situation must be changed, so that measures corresponding to the actual requirements of our nation can be carried into the field of practical politics—and not allowed to “fail to carry” in this way. The whole impression of Scottish politics is like that of a man dominated by a sort of a nightmare he cannot shake off. He would fain get back to his true self—but he cannot move. Just as reading certain papers one gets a wholly disproportionate and unfortunate conception of the world as a place where murders, divorces and all sorts of sensations and scandals are dominant—so the present political system entirely distorts and misrepresents the real condition of Scottish affairs and bogs the attention of the electors in all manner of “professional political” issues which have little or no bearing on their interests, while the latter are excluded from the “sphere of practical politics.” What is wanted is a movement to shake off all the old shibboleths, the tyranny of the catch-phrases; and to found a new conception of politics on the[69] basis of a practical concentration upon the actualities of our national situation.

The Scottish Protestant Churches have manifested increasing alarm for several years over what has become known as the “Irish Invasion” of Scotland. There is no dispute as to the facts. The Irish population is rapidly increasing; the native Scottish population is rapidly declining. The former is mainly confined to the big industrial centres; the latter is leaving the cities, but to a still greater extent is leaving the countryside. The position is that, owing to Irish, and other alien immigration, our urban congestion is not being relieved by the continual drain of emigration. All that is happening is that a certain proportion of Scottish people is being replaced there annually by an equivalent of un-Scottish people. While this is happening in the towns, which, despite all the emigration, continue to show 50 per cent. more unemployment than in England, our rural areas are being steadily depopulated of their irreplaceable native peasantry—and nobody is taking their place. The seriousness of the matter on either count cannot be exaggerated. But the vital thing is not the influx of[70] Irish and other aliens, but the exodus of Scots. It is due to our present economic system—to the condition of Scottish industries on the one hand which renders them incapable of paying adequate wages to Scottish employees and ready, therefore, to supplant them with cheaper Irish labour, and, on the other hand, to the lack of a progressive and native agricultural policy. The causes are political and economic, and if the consequences have religious and social bearings, these should not lead to any misconception as to the causes and any confusion as to how these can, and should be, dealt with. Sectarian trouble, for example, over a purely economic question, is not likely to help matters. This is the danger some of the Scottish Protestant Ministers are running. Their failure to penetrate to the real causes is blinding them to the only solution. That solution is a re-orientation of Scottish affairs on such a basis that Scottish industries and interests would not be systematically sacrificed to English, but developed in accordance with the particular requirements of Scotland, as they could be developed if Scotland were not compelled to pay, as[71] it is under the present system, upwards of £120,000,000 per annum to the Imperial Exchequer, out of which it receives back only some £30,000,000. If the Scottish contribution were equitably applied, many millions a year would become available for Scottish commercial and industrial developments, and not only could the flow of Scottish emigration overseas be arrested, but a stream back to Scotland would speedily set in if Scotland could offer its exiled people anything like the conditions they are obtaining in the colonies. They did not want to emigrate. Economic conditions forced them. Only economic conditions can bring them back. This will never happen so long as a system is applied which is willing to spend £2,000 in settling a Scots overseas, but unwilling to spend £1,000 to settle him at home—although the percentage of such home settlements as have been effected (a miserably small percentage of the applications) which has been successful has been much greater than amongst overseas settlements, relatively expensive as the latter are. Most important of all is the necessity for devising and financing a thorough-going agricultural policy for[72] Scotland, designed to do for it, in accordance with its specific requirements, something like what Denmark and other small nations have achieved for themselves by co-operative methods. But what hope is there for the initiation of any such policy under the present system? Scottish Independence is an indispensable preliminary to any attempt to solve Scottish problems in such a fashion as may arrest the deplorable efflux of Scottish people and the progressive dereliction of the Scottish soil.

Dealing with the question of Irish Immigration, the Committee on Church and Nation of the Established Church of Scotland says: “There are only two explanations of the great racial problem that has arisen in Scotland—the emigration of the Scots and the immigration of the Irish people. There does not seem to be any hope of alleviation of this problem in the future. All available evidence points to its intensification. The outlook for the Scottish race is exceedingly grave. If ever there was a call to the Church of Scotland to stand fast for what men rightly contend dearest—their nationality and their traditions—that call is surely[73] sounding now, when our race and our culture are faced with a peril which, though silent and unostentatious, is the gravest with which the Scottish people has ever been confronted.”

This is true—but not exactly in the sense the Committee intends. It will not do to identify Scottish nationality and traditions wholly with Protestantism. There has always been a considerable native Catholic population, and most of the finest elements in our traditions, in our literature, in our national history, come down from the days when Scotland was wholly Catholic. Neither, in speaking of a “silent and unostentatious peril” will it do to overlook the fact that Scotland has been steadily subject to Anglicization ever since the Union. This, since it does not raise the “religious bogey” in the way the Irish immigration does, is apt to be overlooked, but it should have at least as much attention as the other from the “Scottish” Churches, if at last they are seriously concerned with Scottish nationalism, and not merely with a sectarian issue. Until they face the whole issue of Scottish Nationalism and define what they mean by it and by a[74] national culture, they will be suspected of merely using the term to cover an interest in special issues by no means synonymous with it, however importantly they may be related to it. But the part is not greater than the whole, and an all-round statesman-like attitude is what is necessary, and should be forthcoming from a Church that is truly Scottish and has the deepest interests of Scotland at heart. Nor will these ministerial protagonists gain anything by suggesting that “Scottish employers of labour ought to do their utmost to retain their fellow-countrymen at home.” The suggestion takes no cognizance of economic realities. Nor is the suggested restriction of immigration any more feasible under the existing system. It is impossible to discriminate against the Irish in that way as long as we are co-members of the British Empire. If anything is to be done it must be along the lines of re-acquiring Scottish control of Scottish affairs, and more particularly such a measure of financial autonomy as would enable projects like the mid-Scotland ship canal, land settlement on a far greater scale, the creation of co-operative agencies[75] in our agriculture, afforestation and so forth, to be developed in a way the House of Commons has not allowed—in short, to undo the present neglect of, and contempt for, Scottish affairs, and their treatment, where they have had any, within the limits of alien and inappropriate conceptions, which are largely responsible for the pass to which we have been brought, and which cannot be undone until we have once again a Parliament of our own and are free to move on the axis of our own mentality.

VII

“We should be the last to assert that there are no aspects of the smaller nationalism worth conserving,” says another opponent; “there are many, but the best of them are alive and effective in Scotland to-day, and they have no necessary connection with the structure of Government. But Scotland, without losing her sense of herself as a Scottish[76] nationality, has attained to a full and complete sense of a larger nationality, and she is not going to throw off that sense of partnership in larger nationality under the leadership of archaic and thrown-back minds, all of them belonging to the largely denationalized region of Clydeside.” Now the fact of the matter is that no valuable aspect of “the smaller nationalism” is permitted to function, except under extraordinary handicaps, by the conditions of progressive Anglicization (in violation of even such safeguarding clauses as the Treaty of Union contained), which have increasingly dominated Scotland during the past hundred years. Scotland has ceased to hold any distinctive place in the political or cultural map of Europe. The centralization of book-publishing and journalism in London—the London monopoly of the means of publicity—has reduced Scottish arts and letters to shadows of their former or potential selves, qualitatively beneath contempt in comparison with the distinctive arts and letters of any other country in Europe. There is no Scottish writer to-day of the slightest international standing. Scotland connotes to the world[77] “religious” bigotry, a genius for materialism, “thrift,” and, on the social and cultural side, Harry Lauderism and an exaggerated sentimental nationalism, which is obviously a form of compensation for the lack of a realistic nationalism. No race of men protest their love of country so perfervidly as the Scots—no country in its actual conditions justifies any such protestations less. Every recent reference book in any department of human activity shows the position to which Scotland has degenerated. “Europa, 1926” (although it is presumably designed for British readers) lists contemporary Czech and Bulgarian poets, litterateurs, musicians, etc. (the bare names—which convey nothing!) but it excludes Scotland completely. Ireland, on the contrary, has a section to itself, and a special article on the boundary question. Professor Pittard’s “Race and History,” doing justice to every other people under the sun, deals only very slightly and imperfectly with Scotland, and fails to take account of any of the newer material, e.g., the works of Tocher. Like examples can be multiplied in every direction.

Again, letters from Paris, or “Our Irish Letter,” etc., are familiar features of English newspapers. Whoever saw a “Scottish Letter”? Concern with Scottish interests of any kind has been so completely excluded from publicity, has been made so completely a case of “beating the air,” that the usual headlines following a “Scottish Night” at Westminster are “Absent Members—Empty Benches—During Discussion on Scottish Estimates,” while from the report it appears that the debate resolves itself into a potpourri of stale jokes. Scotland alone of all European countries that have ever been in anything like its position relatively to any other country, has failed to develop a Nationalist Movement capable of affecting the practical political situation in some measure or other. Why have the Scottish members of all parties who have supported the numerous successive Scottish Home Rule measures acquiesced so tamely in their defeat at the hands of the English majority? There must be more in this acquiescence than meets the eye. It represents an abrogation of themselves, for all effective purposes, as the political[79] leaders of Scotland of which it is inconceivable that they should be guilty, unless—behind the ostensible position—they were cognizant of a power against which they were incapable of contending, a power so possessed of the monopoly of mass publicity that it could completely stultify them by its all-pervasive suppressio veri, suggestio falsi the instant they went beyond a given line.

Contrasting the pre-Union achievements and promise of Scottish arts and letters with the beggarly results since, it is not too much to assert that Scottish Nationality was sold for “a mess of pottage,” and that Scotland has since been paying the price by submitting to the diversion of her entire energies into purely materialistic channels—not, however, as the present condition of Scotland and Scottish industries shows, for its own benefit. For whose, then? That I shall attempt to indicate. But, first of all, it cannot be too strongly stressed that its social, commercial, and industrial conditions to-day afford strong prima facie evidence that if, as is commonly contended, Scotland has owed a great deal materialistically (whatever it may have[80] lost in other directions) to its Union with England, it has now wholly ceased to derive any such advantages; the boot, indeed, is on the other foot; and on that, as on other grounds, it is high time to reconsider the relationships between the two countries.

What prevents the development of well-informed and positive policies in regard to such problems as that of the Scottish Highlands? Col. John Buchan, M.P., expressed the opinion in a letter to the present writer that “it is impossible to make up one’s mind on the Scottish Home Rule question—the necessary facts, and figures are not available.” Why are they not available? In certain directions these have been systematically refused by Government Departments—or purposely embodied along with the English in such a way that comparisons between the two countries cannot be instituted. In other directions the refusal of financial facilitation, as Mr William Graham, M.P., has pointed out, has resulted in the creation of a tremendous leeway in the economic and social documentation of Scotland, so that in practically every direction laborious independent research is necessary[81] to get at the facts and figures. They are nowhere readily available.

The vested interests of the Scottish daily papers are all part and parcel of the sequelæ of the Union. They all “make a show” of Scottishness by dealing in windy and suitably contradictory generalizations with Scottish topics—but they all toe the secret line. Letters sent in by readers are carefully censored. Opinions may be expressed (preferably anti-nationalist, or, better still, merely sentimentally nationalist), but facts and figures are not permitted—or, at all events, only isolated ones. Nothing can get published that attempts to relate facts and figures in regard to Scottish subjects to each other, and thus, to a national policy of any kind. There is not a single paper that dare publish a series of articles dealing thoroughly and systematically either with the case for Scottish Home Rule or with any of the major social or economic problems of Scotland. Nor dare they relax their vigilance in respect of the utterance of Scottish M.P.s in Parliament. Only so much is allowed “through”; the rest must be kept back in the sieve. What does appear must appear so fragmentarily[82] and disjointedly—and be so offset by the facetiousness and belittlement of leaders and tittle-tattle paragraphs—that it cannot conduce to the creation of any “well-informed and positive policy.” What hidden interests behind the newspapers dictate this corruption of their natural functions and insist upon a journalism to bamboozle rather than educate the public—a journalism to make “confusion worse confounded” rather than to clarify national issues in a systematic and rational fashion? What is the meaning of the whole position and policy that is, superficially, so determinedly unintelligible?

It is utterly irrational to find all the real practical issues of a nation “outwith the sphere of practical politics” and that sphere monopolized by professional-politician issues, few of which have the most indirect bearing upon national realities. It is utterly irrational to find a whole electorate bemused and misled (for all practical purposes) by such an abracadabra. That is the position of Scotland to-day. All the Scottish papers aver that the demand for Scottish nationalism is made by “a handful of fanatics,” and[83] has no real weight of “public opinion” behind it—but what is “public opinion,” and how far is it reflected by a Press which, in a country which has always been overwhelmingly radical and republican, and where to-day a third of the entire electorate vote Socialist, is solidly sycophantic and anti-socialist? The Glasgow Herald, in a recent leader, observed that there was no need for street-corner oratory in these days of a great free Press whose columns are open for the expression of all manner of opinion, and its editor, Sir Robert Bruce, is frequently to be heard dilating on the high status and professional integrity of the journalist to-day. Yet it is simple fact that there is no free Press and that journalists hold their jobs by opportunism and cannot afford to “own their own souls.” A man with “ideas of his own” is of no use in a modern newspaper office. The vigilance of the Press censorship—the ubiquitous range and insidiousness of the policy behind it—is such that even The Glasgow Herald does not, and cannot, permit signed correspondence on such subjects as Scottish music or drama, for example (let alone politics), if these go[84] against the ideas of the vested interests concerned with these departments, not to speak of the veiled interests behind these vested interests which “hold all the strings in their hands.” Interplay of opinion is confined to opposing views within a certain range; but the essence of the matter all the time, so far as the ultimate interests are concerned, is “Heads I win, tails you lose.” It is this that makes a goblin of the vaunted Scottish hard-headedness and practicality—induces the amazing supineness of the successful protagonists of Scottish Devolution Measures when these are rejected by the English majority at Westminster—prevents any real Scottish issue emerging into the realm of “practical politics”—makes the systematic neglect of Scottish interests of all kinds a subject for stereotyped jokes in the Scottish Press (professedly favourable to “legitimate” nationalist aspirations—in China)—prevents different sections of the Scottish public realizing that their diverse grievances and difficulties spring from a common centre and denies them those publicist services which would effectively relate consequence to cause—and foists,[85] not least upon Scotsmen themselves, that stock conception of the “canny Scot,” which is so belied by the actualities of our national position that it can only be accounted for by saying that if, as M. Delaisi argues, government is impossible unless a myth of some kind is foisted upon the “people,” then, so far as Scotland is concerned, its present disastrous condition is due to the fact that the existing myth is out of touch with realities to a degree so abnormal that history presents no parallel to it.

Discussing the possibilities of a Scottish Renaissance I have written elsewhere that the Credit Reform proposals of Major C. H. Douglas will be “discerned in retrospect as having been one of the great contributions of re-oriented Scottish genius to world-affairs,” and that I wished to record my unqualified pride and joy in the fact that of all people in the world a Scotsman—one of the race that has been (and remains) most hag-ridden by commercial Calvinism, with its hideous doctrine of ‘the need to work,’ ‘the necessity of drudgery,’ and its devices of ‘thrift,’ and the whole tortuous paraphernalia of modern capitalism—should have absolutely[86] ‘got to the bottom of economics,’ and shown the way to the Workless State.

It is significant that practically the only, and certainly the only real (if, unfortunately, only very partial and temporary) political triumph Scotland has scored over England since the Union of the Parliaments took place just over 100 years ago: and was associated with the name of a great Scotsman and with precisely the type of business which it has since become almost physically impossible to think—let alone speak—about. The Banking System! I refer to Sir Walter Scott’s Letters of Malachi Malagrowther. Just how much Scott (albeit a Tory of Tories, and a national liability rather than an asset in most respects), was roused by the Government’s proposal that Scottish Banks should cease to issue notes “in order to unify paper currency throughout the United Kingdom,” can be gauged from his veiled threat that “claymores have edges.” Scott’s agitation was so far successful that the Government dropped their proposals inasmuch as they related to the Scotch pound notes—for the time being.[87] “Very probably,” says a recent writer, “they realized that there was real determination behind Scott’s reference to claymores—even if it did not actually mean the wielding of these lethal weapons to enforce the protest.” All who are in earnest about Scottish Home Rule should take a note of that. Evidences of “real determination” must be forthcoming if anything is to be achieved. The Parliamentary record of the Scottish Home Rule question would long ago have driven protagonists of any mental and moral calibre to the realization that an irresistible premium had been put upon the recourse to militant methods, and that anything else is a waste of time—“an expenditure of spirit in a waste of shame.”

But a great deal has happened since 1826. The existence of a Scotsman of Sir Walter’s calibre was a nasty snag for the Government of the day—but the policy behind them could afford to wait, to pretend to yield; it is not every generation, happily, that throws up such a figure to thwart its purposes, although Lord Rosebery did concede that Scotland is “the milch cow of the Empire.” There has appeared no Scotsman since of equal[88] size to do anything analogous and to expose the tremendous losses to Scotland through the financial unification of Scotland with England that has since been consummated. The dangers that Scott apprehended and warded off a hundred years ago are fully battening on Scottish interests to-day, and they are powerless to defend themselves. How powerless is indicated by the fact that the Scottish Press (whose columns are shut to all discussion of national realities) gives prominence to such ridiculous statements as that of Mr Ridge Beedle, prospective Unionist candidate for the Camlachie Division of Glasgow, who says that “it is owing to the Scottish Home Rule Movement that new industries are not settling in Scotland; industrialists are preferring locations in England where continuity and settled conditions are assured.” Thousands upon thousands of Scottish electors are so hopelessly bemused that they swallow an absurdity like that as if it were a self-evident truth. If it were, the difficulties of Scottish Nationalism would be over. Our English competitors would be falling over each other to subsidize it and ensure its success.

VIII

Here the connection between the diverse movements in Scotland I indicated as so superficially incompatible becomes clear. The Credit Reform Movement is essentially one for the removal of all the false restraints under which humanity is labouring. It is not without significance that its leader, Major Douglas, should belong to the race which has suffered most abominably from the forms under which it has been subjected to two of the greatest agencies—the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution—which the impelling force, which has multiplied these restrains until “civilization” is tending to reduce the majority of mankind to the condition of robots, has utilized in securing that stranglehold on life which it is now visibly exercising. Will Scotland yet produce

Do not the intolerable conditions to which it has been reduced, the unparalleled anomalies in its “national” finance, suggest that a flanking movement against the Powers of Finance may be best achieved through it. This is “the place where the spring of action will play”—where alone a counterforce to that which is not only making for centralization in all directions and superannuating such agencies of differentiation as Scots and Gaelic, but would eliminate religion by completely mechanizing the masses of mankind and make Socialism the last and worst stage in capitalism—the Servile State—rather than the first in a new and nobler order, can be generated. Here is the “comprehensive-enough agency”—“the nation-size principle”—the meeting ground of Scottish Nationalists, Catholics and Socialists, those diverse elements upon whose recognition of their interdependence, their need to complement and moderate each other, depends not only the realizable proportion of the ideals of each but a Scottish Renaissance of international consequence. Let us not fight with enemies—England, commercial Calvinism, “Progress,” thought-hating[91] democracy—which are merely the agents of the foe that is really worthy of our steel, the cause that lies behind them all; but, in concentrating on the latter, remember that every other nation has suffered in like fashion to some degree from its operations, and make common cause with the elements in all these other countries which are seeking to overcome it.

It is noteworthy that banking and national interests in Scotland are far more conspicuously divorced from each other than in most countries. There is less “cover” here than at the centre. Leading Scottish bankers do not discourse, like their English brethren, on current topics; they confine themselves to the business in hand. Mr McKenna and the like may create a diversion by pretending to let, not the cat, but one or two of its meows out of the bag occasionally, but in Scotland the public is too docile even to need “circuses.”

The amalgamation of the Scottish banks with the English, along with such subsidiary developments or sequelæ of the same policy, as the amalgamation of the railways, and the English control of Scottish newspapers, represents one side[92] of that picture of which the inevitable obverse is the fact that the collective area of deer forests (1,709,892 acres in 1883) is now 3,599,744 acres; seventeen Scottish counties to-day have a population less than it was fifty years ago, eleven have less than in 1821, and five less than in 1801; and of the remaining population of the country more than 45 per cent. (over two million people) live more than two in a room!

These tendencies are continuing at an accelerating rate. This is the price Scotland is paying for its “sense of participation in a larger nationality”—a sense that even then must be qualified by recognition of the fact that the “larger nationality” will in turn be subjected to the same “policy” as the “smaller” (although both, no doubt, may continue a while longer to have a sense of “Empire”)—unless Scotland comes to the rescue of England in the manner suggested.

The Scottish Convention of Burghs (of which I have been a member) is the oldest municipal institution in Europe—it is also the most effete and powerless. Otherwise its continued existence would not be tolerated for a moment. Let it[93] discuss with any “real determination” the effect of the amalgamation of the Scottish banks, railways, etc., with the English—or the relation of the banking system to the policy of neglect and deliberate “misunderstanding” which is eviscerating Scotland—and it will speedily see the end of its long history.

Scotland’s, and more than Scotland’s, only hope—albeit yet a slender one—is through the Scottish Socialist movement, and, it may be, one of its Irish Catholic leaders. The closer inter-relationship of the Scottish Socialist and Nationalist Movements, their increasing identity of personnel, and happily, their tardy concentration on the financial aspect, is the one promising feature in the situation, unparalleled in history, in which a whole nation, reputedly hard-headed and patriotic, have been almost ineradicably persuaded by (mainly alien—or alienated) financial interests that black is white and white black until they wax only the more perfervid in their patriotic protestations, and the more diligent in their Sisyphus task of futile “thrift,” the more their country is denuded of population, status, and prosperity, and themselves of all that[94] makes life worth living. It is significant that The Scotsman and other Anglo-Scottish papers dealing with the new Draft Bill, are increasingly conceding the “advantages” of sentimental nationalism, but simultaneously warning their readers that “realistic nationalism” will be reactionary and profitless—“what Scotland wants is not a Parliament of its own, but more employment, new industries,” etc., as if the present system were supplying these, and nationalism threatened the supply. Happily, as I have said, the Scottish Home Rule Movement is rapidly re-orienting itself along realist lines, but the degree of realism achieved has not yet reached through to the financial backwork of our affairs, the real manipulation area, without control of which “self-determination” is only a delusion and a snare. This is not surprising—when that stage has not even been reached in the Irish Free State despite the long history of intense nationalistic activity there and the relatively great measure of “political success” achieved. But the Scottish psychology differs from the Irish, and, nationalistically laggard as Scotland has been in comparison with[95] other countries, there are grounds for anticipating that, once it does waken up, it will redeem the leeway at a single stride and be the first to penetrate into that arcanum which still foils even Mr de Valera with its intangible and ubiquitous barriers.

Whether “dreamers of dreams” can still prove themselves “movers and shakers of the world” or not, the protagonists of a Scottish Renaissance are dreaming the dream outlined in these pages, and have already earned at least the right to say to their countrymen in the words of Jaurès: “It is we who are the true heirs of the ancestral hearth: we have taken its flame while you have kept but the cinders.”

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Icarus, or the Future of Science. By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. Fourth impression.

Tantalus, or the Future of Man. By F. C. S. Schiller, D.Sc., Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Second impression.

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Thrasymachus, the Future of Morals. By C. E. M. Joad, author of “The Babbitt Warren,” etc. Second impression.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 23: ‘more medieval in’ replaced by ‘more mediæval in’.
Pg 53: ‘is not suprising’ replaced by ‘is not surprising’.

Catalog:
Pg C17: ‘their montrous’ replaced by ‘their monstrous’.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Albyn; or, Scotland and the future

ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

SIXTY VOLUMES ARE NOW PUBLISHED

FROM THE REVIEWS

VOLUMES READY

NEARLY READY

IN PREPARATION

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Albyn; or, Scotland and the future

ALBYN OR SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

SIXTY VOLUMES ARE NOW PUBLISHED

FROM THE REVIEWS

VOLUMES READY

NEARLY READY

IN PREPARATION

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE