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Title: Albyn; or, Scotland and the future
Author: Hugh MacDiarmid
Release date: September 18, 2024 [eBook #74438]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1927
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell, John Campbell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
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There is only one footnote in this book. It has anchor [1], and the
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ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_A List of the Contents of
this Series will be found
at the end of this volume_
ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
BY
C. M. GRIEVE
_Author of ‘Contemporary Scottish Studies,’ ‘The Present
Position of Scottish Music,’ etc._
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & Co.
1927
_To what genius are addressed the disquietudes stirred in our
conscience by a setting so poor and so strong?_
MAURICE BARRÈS.
_All despair in politics is an absolute stupidity._
CHARLES MAURRAS.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM.
ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
I
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
II
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,
associated with a peerless directness of utterance
“Nae bombast swell,
Nae snap conceits.”
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
Ye are na Mary Morison,
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. 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.
In days when mankind were but callans
At grammar, logic, and sic talents,
They took nae pains their speech to balance
Or rules to gie,
But spak’ their thoughts in plain braid lallans
Like you or me.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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.
IV
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 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 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 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 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
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; 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 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 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 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 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.
V
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”
VI
Several reviewers of the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher’s biography of
the late Viscount Bryce have expressed their 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?
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 “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 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 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 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 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 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 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,
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 ‘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.
“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 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
“Eighth marvel of seven on earth,
A Douglas at peace?”
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
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 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 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
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 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.”
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM.
_SIXTY VOLUMES ARE NOW PUBLISHED_
TO-DAY AND
TO-MORROW
_Each, pott 8vo, boards, 2/6 net_
This series of books, by some of the most distinguished English
thinkers, scientists, philosophers, doctors, critics, and artists,
was at once recognized as a noteworthy event. Written from various
points of view, one book frequently opposing the argument of
another, they provide the reader with a stimulating survey of
the most modern thought in many departments of life. Several
volumes are devoted to the future trend of Civilization, conceived
as a whole; while others deal with particular provinces. It is
interesting to see in these neat little volumes, issued at a low
price, the revival of a form of literature, the Pamphlet, which has
been in disuse for many years.
_Published by_
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
Broadway House: 68-74 Carter Lane, London, E.C.4
_FROM THE REVIEWS_
_Times Literary Supplement_: “An entertaining series of vivacious
and stimulating studies of modern tendencies.”
_Spectator_: “Scintillating monographs ... that very lively and
courageous series.”
_Observer_: “There seems no reason why the brilliant To-day and
To-morrow Series should come to an end for a century of to-morrows.
At first it seemed impossible for the publishers to keep up the
sport through a dozen volumes, but the series already runs to more
than two score. A remarkable series....”
_Daily Telegraph_: “This admirable series of essays, provocative
and brilliant.”
_Nation_: “We are able to peer into the future by means of that
brilliant series [which] will constitute a precious document upon
the present time.”—_T. S. Eliot._
_Manchester Dispatch_: “The more one reads of these pamphlets, the
more avid becomes the appetite. We hope the list is endless.”
_Irish Statesman_: “Full of lively controversy.”
_Daily Herald_: “This series has given us many monographs of
brilliance and discernment.... The stylistic excellencies of this
provocative series.”
_Field_: “We have long desired to express the deep admiration
felt by every thinking scholar and worker at the present day for
this series. We must pay tribute to the high standard of thought
and expression they maintain. As small gift-books, austerely yet
prettily produced, they remain unequalled of their kind. We can
give but the briefest suggestions of their value to the student,
the politician, and the voter....”
_New York World_: “Holds the palm in the speculative and
interpretative thought of the age.”
_VOLUMES READY_
=Daedalus=, or Science and the Future. By J. B. S. HALDANE, Reader in
Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. _Seventh impression._
“A fascinating and daring little book.”—_Westminster Gazette._
“The essay is brilliant, sparkling with wit and bristling with
challenges.”—_British Medical Journal._
“Predicts the most startling changes.”—_Morning Post._
=Callinicus=, a Defence of Chemical Warfare. By J. B. S. HALDANE.
_Second impression._
“Mr Haldane’s brilliant study.”—_Times Leading Article._ “A book to
be read by every intelligent adult.”—_Spectator._ “This brilliant
little monograph.”—_Daily News._
=Icarus=, or the Future of Science. By BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S.
_Fourth impression._
“Utter pessimism.”—_Observer._ “Mr Russell refuses to believe
that the progress of Science must be a boon to mankind.”—_Morning
Post._ “A stimulating book, that leaves one not at all
discouraged.”—_Daily Herald._
=What I Believe.= By BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. _Third impression._
“One of the most brilliant and thought-stimulating little books I
have read—a better book even than _Icarus_.”—_Nation._ “Simply and
brilliantly written.”—_Nature._ “In stabbing sentences he punctures
the bubble of cruelty, envy, narrowness, and ill-will which those
in authority call their morals.”—_New Leader._
=Tantalus=, or the Future of Man. By F. C. S. SCHILLER, D.SC., Fellow
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. _Second impression._
“They are all (_Daedalus_, _Icarus_, and _Tantalus_) brilliantly
clever, and they supplement or correct one another.”—_Dean
Inge_, in _Morning Post_. “Immensely valuable and infinitely
readable.”—_Daily News._ “The book of the week.”—_Spectator._
=Cassandra=, or the Future of the British Empire. By F. C. S.
SCHILLER, D.SC.
“We commend it to the complacent of all parties.”—_Saturday
Review._ “The book is small, but very, very weighty; brilliantly
written, it ought to be read by all shades of politicians and
students of politics.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “Yet another addition to
that bright constellation of pamphlets.”—_Spectator._
=Quo Vadimus?= Glimpses of the Future. By E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE,
D.SC., _Second Impression._
“A wonderful vision of the future. A book that will be talked
about.”—_Daily Graphic._ “A remarkable contribution to a remarkable
series.”—_Manchester Dispatch._ “Interesting and singularly
plausible.”—_Daily Telegraph._
=Thrasymachus=, the Future of Morals. By C. E. M. JOAD, author of
“The Babbitt Warren,” etc. _Second impression._
“His provocative book.”—_Graphic._ “Written in a style of
deliberate brilliance.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “As outspoken
and unequivocal a contribution as could well be imagined. Even
those readers who dissent will be forced to recognize the
admirable clarity with which he states his case. A book that will
startle.”—_Daily Chronicle._
=Lysistrata=, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman. By ANTHONY M.
LUDOVICI, author of “A Defence of Aristocracy,” etc. _Second
Impression._
“A stimulating book. Volumes would be needed to deal, in the
fullness his work provokes, with all the problems raised.”—_Sunday
Times._ “Pro-feminine but anti-feministic.”—_Scotsman._ “Full of
brilliant commonsense.”—_Observer._
=Hypatia=, or Woman and Knowledge. By MRS BERTRAND RUSSELL. With a
frontispiece. _Third impression._
An answer to _Lysistrata_. “A passionate vindication of the
rights of woman.”—_Manchester Guardian._ “Says a number of things
that sensible women have been wanting publicly said for a long
time.”—_Daily Herald._
=Hephaestus=, the Soul of the Machine. By E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE, D.SC.
“A worthy contribution to this interesting series. A delightful
and thought-provoking essay.”—_Birmingham Post._ “There is a
special pleasure in meeting with a book like _Hephaestus_.
The author has the merit of really understanding what he is
talking about.”—_Engineering._ “An exceedingly clever defence of
machinery.”—_Architects’ Journal._
=The Passing of the Phantoms=: a Study of Evolutionary Psychology and
Morals. By C. J. PATTEN, Professor of Anatomy, Sheffield University.
With 4 Plates.
“Readers of _Daedalus_, _Icarus_ and _Tantalus_, will be
grateful for an excellent presentation of yet another point
of view.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “This bright and bracing little
book.”—_Literary Guide._ “Interesting and original.”—_Medical
Times._
=The Mongol in our Midst=: a Study of Man and his Three Faces. By
F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D., F.R.C.P. With 28 Plates. _Second Edition,
revised._
“A brilliant piece of speculative induction.”—_Saturday Review._
“An extremely interesting and suggestive book, which will reward
careful reading.”—_Sunday Times._ “The pictures carry fearful
conviction.”—_Daily Herald._
=The Conquest of Cancer.= By H. W. S. WRIGHT, M.S., F.R.C.S.
Introduction by F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D.
“Eminently suitable for general reading. The problem is fairly
and lucidly presented. One merit of Mr Wright’s plan is that he
tells people what, in his judgment, they can best do, _here and
now_.”—From the _Introduction_.
=Pygmalion=, or the Doctor of the Future. By R. MCNAIR WILSON, M.B.
“Dr Wilson has added a brilliant essay to this series.”—_Times
Literary Supplement._ “This is a very little book, but there is
much wisdom in it.”—_Evening Standard._ “No doctor worth his salt
would venture to say that Dr Wilson was wrong.”—_Daily Herald._
=Prometheus=, or Biology and the Advancement of Man. By H. S.
JENNINGS, Professor of Zoology, Johns Hopkins University. _Second
Impression._
“This volume is one of the most remarkable that has yet appeared
in this series. Certainly the information it contains will be
new to most educated laymen. It is essentially a discussion
of ... heredity and environment, and it clearly establishes
the fact that the current use of these terms has no scientific
justification.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “An exceedingly
brilliant book.”—_New Leader._
=Narcissus=: an Anatomy of Clothes. By GERALD HEARD. With 19
illustrations.
“A most suggestive book.”—_Nation._ “Irresistible. Reading it is
like a switchback journey. Starting from prehistoric times we
rocket down the ages.”—_Daily News._ “Interesting, provocative, and
entertaining.”—_Queen._
=Thamyris=, or Is There a Future for Poetry? By R. C. TREVELYAN.
“Learned, sensible, and very well-written.”—_Affable Hawk_, in
_New Statesman_. “Very suggestive.”—_J. C. Squire_, in _Observer_.
“A very charming piece of work, I agree with all, or at any rate,
almost all its conclusions.”—_J. St Loe Strachey_, in _Spectator_.
=Proteus=, or the Future of Intelligence. By VERNON LEE, author of
“Satan the Waster,” etc.
“We should like to follow the author’s suggestions as to the
effect of intelligence on the future of Ethics, Aesthetics,
and Manners. Her book is profoundly stimulating and should be
read by everyone.”—_Outlook._ “A concise, suggestive piece of
work.”—_Saturday Review._
=Timotheus=, the Future of the Theatre. By BONAMY DOBRÉE, author of
“Restoration Drama,” etc.
“A witty, mischievous little book, to be read with delight.”—_Times
Literary Supplement._ “This is a delightfully witty
book.”—_Scotsman._ “In a subtly satirical vein he visualizes
various kinds of theatres in 200 years’ time. His gay little book
makes delightful reading.”—_Nation._
=Paris=, or the Future of War. By Captain B. H. LIDDELL HART.
“A companion volume to _Callinicus_. A gem of close thinking
and deduction.”—_Observer._ “A noteworthy contribution to a
problem of concern to every citizen in this country.”—_Daily
Chronicle._ “There is some lively thinking about the future of war
in Paris, just added to this set of live-wire pamphlets on big
subjects.”—_Manchester Guardian._
=Wireless Possibilities.= By Professor A. M. LOW. With 4 diagrams.
“As might be expected from an inventor who is always so fresh,
he has many interesting things to say.”—_Evening Standard._ “The
mantle of Blake has fallen upon the physicists. To them we look for
visions, and we find them in this book.”—_New Statesman._
=Perseus=: of Dragons. By H. F. SCOTT STOKES. With 2 illustrations.
“A diverting little book, chock-full of ideas. Mr Stokes’
dragon-lore is both quaint and various.”—_Morning Post._ “Very
amusingly written, and a mine of curious knowledge for which the
discerning reader will find many uses.”—_Glasgow Herald._
=Lycurgus=, or the Future of Law. By E. S. P. HAYNES, author of
“Concerning Solicitors,” etc.
“An interesting and concisely written book.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “He
roundly declares that English criminal law is a blend of barbaric
violence, medieval prejudices and modern fallacies.... A humane
and conscientious investigation.”—_T.P.’s Weekly._ “A thoughtful
book—deserves careful reading.”—_Law Times._
=Euterpe=, or the Future of Art. By LIONEL R. MCCOLVIN, author of
“The Theory of Book-Selection.”
“Discusses briefly, but very suggestively, the problem of the
future of art in relation to the public.”—_Saturday Review._
“Another indictment of machinery as a soul-destroyer ... Mr Colvin
has the courage to suggest solutions.”—_Westminster Gazette._ “This
is altogether a much-needed book.”—_New Leader._
=Pegasus=, or Problems of Transport. By Colonel J. F. C. FULLER,
author of “The Reformation of War,” etc. With 8 Plates.
“The foremost military prophet of the day propounds a solution
for industrial and unemployment problems. It is a bold essay
... and calls for the attention of all concerned with imperial
problems.”—_Daily Telegraph._ “Practical, timely, very interesting
and very important.”—_J. St Loe Strachey_, in _Spectator_.
=Atlantis=, or America and the Future. By Colonel J. F. C. FULLER.
“Candid and caustic.”—_Observer._ “Many hard things have been
said about America, but few quite so bitter and caustic as
these.”—_Daily Sketch._ “He can conjure up possibilities of a new
Atlantis.”—_Clarion._
=Midas=, or the United States and the Future. By C. H. BRETHERTON,
author of “The Real Ireland,” etc.
A companion volume to _Atlantis_. “Full of astute observations and
acute reflections ... this wise and witty pamphlet, a provocation
to the thought that is creative.”—_Morning Poet._ “A punch in every
paragraph. One could hardly ask for more ‘meat.’”—_Spectator._
=Nuntius=, or Advertising and its Future. By GILBERT RUSSELL.
“Expresses the philosophy of advertising concisely and
well.”—_Observer._ “It is doubtful if a more straightforward
exposition of the part advertising plays in our public and private
life has been written.”—_Manchester Guardian._
=Birth Control and the State=: a Plea and a Forecast. By C. P.
BLACKER, _M.C._, M.A., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
“A very careful summary.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “A
temperate and scholarly survey of the arguments for and against
the encouragement of the practice of birth control.”—_Lancet._
“He writes lucidly, moderately, and from wide knowledge; his book
undoubtedly gives a better understanding of the subject than any
other brief account we know. It also suggests a policy.”—_Saturday
Review._
=Ouroboros=, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind. By GARET GARRETT.
“This brilliant and provoking little book.”—_Observer._ “A
significant and thoughtful essay, calculated in parts to make our
flesh creep.”—_Spectator._ “A brilliant writer, Mr Garrett is a
remarkable man. He explains something of the enormous change the
machine has made in life.”—_Daily Express._
=Artifex=, or the Future of Craftsmanship. By JOHN GLOAG, author of
“Time, Taste, and Furniture.”
“An able and interesting summary of the history of craftsmanship
in the past, a direct criticism of the present, and at the end his
hopes for the future. Mr Gloag’s real contribution to the future of
craftsmanship is his discussion of the uses of machinery.”—_Times
Literary Supplement._
=Plato’s American Republic.= By J. DOUGLAS WOODRUFF. _Fourth
impression._
“Uses the form of the Socratic dialogue with devastating success.
A gently malicious wit sparkles in every page.”—_Sunday Times._
“Having deliberately set himself an almost impossible task, has
succeeded beyond belief.”—_Saturday Review._ “Quite the liveliest
even of this spirited series.”—_Observer._
=Orpheus=, or the Music of the Future. By W. J. TURNER, author of
“Music and Life.” _Second impression._
“A book on music that we can read not merely once, but twice or
thrice. Mr Turner has given us some of the finest thinking upon
Beethoven that I have ever met with.”—_Ernest Newman_ in _Sunday
Times_. “A brilliant essay in contemporary philosophy.”—_Outlook._
“The fruit of real knowledge and understanding.”—_New Statesman._
=Terpander=, or Music and the Future. By E. J. DENT, author of
“Mozart’s Operas.”
“In _Orpheus_ Mr Turner made a brilliant voyage in search of
first principles. Mr Dent’s book is a skilful review of the
development of music. It is the most succinct and stimulating
essay on music I have found....”—_Musical News._ “Remarkably able
and stimulating.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “There is hardly
another critic alive who could sum up contemporary tendencies so
neatly.”—_Spectator._
=Sibylla=, or the Revival of Prophecy. By C. A. MACE, University of
St. Andrew’s.
“An entertaining and instructive pamphlet.”—_Morning Post._
“Places a nightmare before us very ably and wittily.”—_Spectator._
“Passages in it are excellent satire, but on the whole Mr Mace’s
speculations may be taken as a trustworthy guide ... to modern
scientific thought.”—_Birmingham Post._
=Lucullus=, or the Food of the Future. By OLGA HARTLEY and MRS C. F.
LEYEL, authors of “The Gentle Art of Cookery.”
“This is a clever and witty little volume in an entertaining
series, and it makes enchanting reading.”—_Times Literary
Supplement._ “Opens with a brilliant picture of modern man, living
in a vacuum-cleaned, steam-heated, credit-furnished suburban
mansion ‘with a wolf in the basement’—the wolf of hunger. This
banquet of epigrams.”—_Spectator._
=Procrustes=, or the Future of English Education. By M. ALDERTON PINK.
“Undoubtedly he makes out a very good case.”—_Daily Herald._
“This interesting addition to the series.”—_Times Educational
Supplement._ “Intends to be challenging and succeeds in being so.
All fit readers will find it stimulating.”—_Northern Echo._
=The Future of Futurism.= By JOHN RODKER.
“Mr Rodker is up-to-the-minute, and he has accomplished a
considerable feat in writing on such a vague subject, 92 extremely
interesting pages.”—_T. S. Eliot_, in _Nation_. “There are a good
many things in this book which are of interest.”—_Times Literary
Supplement._
=Pomona=, or the Future of English. By _Basil de Sélincourt_, author
of “The English Secret”, etc.
“The future of English is discussed fully and with fascinating
interest.”—_Morning Post._ “Full of wise thoughts and happy
words.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “His later pages must stir
the blood of any man who loves his country and her poetry.”—_J. C.
Squire_, in _Observer_. “His finely-conceived essay.”—_Manchester
Guardian._
=Balbus=, or the Future of Architecture. By CHRISTIAN BARMAN.
“A really brilliant addition to this already distinguished
series. The reading of _Balbus_ will give much data for
intelligent prophecy, and incidentally, an hour or so of excellent
entertainment.”—_Spectator._ “Most readable and reasonable. We can
recommend it warmly.”—_New Statesman._ “This intriguing little
book.”—_Connoisseur._
=Apella=, or the Future of the Jews. By A QUARTERLY REVIEWER.
“Cogent, because of brevity and a magnificent prose style, this
book wins our quiet praise. It is a fine pamphlet, adding to the
value of the series, and should not be missed.”—_Spectator._ “A
notable addition to this excellent series. His arguments are a
provocation to fruitful thinking.”—_Morning Post._
=The Dance of Çiva=, or Life’s Unity and Rhythm. By COLLUM.
“It has substance and thought in it. The author is very much alive
and responsive to the movements of to-day.”—_Spectator._ “A very
interesting account of the work of Sir Jagadis Bose.”—_Oxford
Magazine._ “Has caught the spirit of the Eastern conception of
world movements.”—_Calcutta Statesman._
=Lars Porsena=, or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language. By
ROBERT GRAVES. _Third impression._
“Goes uncommonly well, and deserves to.”—_Observer._ “Not for
squeamish readers.”—_Spectator._ “No more amusingly unexpected
contribution has been made to this series. A deliciously ironical
affair.”—_Bystander._ “His highly entertaining essay is as full
as the current standard of printers and police will allow.”—_New
Statesman._ “Humour and style are beyond criticism.”—_Irish
Statesman._
=Socrates=, or the Emancipation of Mankind. By H. F. CARLILL.
“Devotes a specially lively section to the herd instinct.”—_Times._
“Clearly, and with a balance that is almost Aristotelian, he
reveals what modern psychology is going to accomplish.”—_New
Statesman._ “One of the most brilliant and important of a
remarkable series.”—_Westminster Gazette._
=Delphos=, or the Future of International Language. By E. SYLVIA
PANKHURST.
“Equal to anything yet produced in this brilliant series. Miss
Pankhurst states very clearly what all thinking people must soon
come to believe, that an international language would be one of the
greatest assets of civilization.”—_Spectator._ “A most readable
book, full of enthusiasm, an important contribution to this
subject.”—_International Language._
=Gallio=, or the Tyranny of Science. By J. W. N. SULLIVAN, author of
“A History of Mathematics.”
“So packed with ideas that it is not possible to give any adequate
_résumé_ of its contents.”—_Times Literary Supplement._ “His
remarkable monograph, his devastating summary of materialism, this
pocket _Novum Organum_.”—_Spectator._ “Possesses a real distinction
of thought and manner. It must be read.”—_New Statesman._
=Apollonius=, or the Future of Psychical Research. By E. N. BENNETT,
author of “Problems of Village Life,” etc.
“A sane, temperate and suggestive survey of a field of inquiry
which is slowly but surely pushing to the front.”—_Times Literary
Supplement._ “His exposition of the case for psychic research is
lucid and interesting.”—_Scotsman._ “Displays the right temper,
admirably conceived, skilfully executed.”—_Liverpool Post._
=Aeolus=, or the Future of the Flying Machine. By OLIVER STEWART.
“Both his wit and his expertness save him from the
nonsensical-fantastic. There is nothing vague or sloppy in these
imaginative forecasts.”—_Daily News._ “He is to be congratulated.
His book is small, but it is so delightfully funny that it is well
worth the price, and there really are sensible ideas behind the
jesting.”—_Aeroplane._
=Stentor=, or the Press of To-Day and To-Morrow. By DAVID OCKHAM.
“A valuable and exceedingly interesting commentary on a vital phase
of modern development.”—_Daily Herald._ “Vigorous and well-written,
eminently readable.”—_Yorkshire Post._ “He has said what one
expects any sensible person to say about the ‘trustification’ of
the Press.”—_Spectator._
=Rusticus=, or the Future of the Countryside. By MARTIN S. BRIGGS,
F.R.I.B.A.
“Few of the 50 volumes, provocative and brilliant as most of them
have been, capture our imagination as does this one.”—_Daily
Telegraph._ “The historical part is as brilliant a piece of packed
writing as could be desired.”—_Daily Herald._ “Serves a national
end. The book is in essence a pamphlet, though it has the form and
charm of a book.”—_Spectator._
=Janus=, or the Conquest of War. By WILLIAM MCDOUGALL, M.B., F.R.S.
“Among all the booklets of this brilliant series, none, I think
is so weighty and impressive as this. It contains thrice as much
matter as the other volumes and is profoundly serious.”—Dean Inge,
in _Evening Standard_. “A deeply interesting and fair-minded study
of the causes of war and the possibilities of their prevention.
Every word is sound.”—_Spectator._
=Vulcan=, or the Future of Labour. By CECIL CHISHOLM.
“Of absorbing interest.”—_Daily Herald._ “No one, perhaps, has
ever condensed so many hard facts into the appearance of agreeable
fiction, nor held the balance so nicely between technicalities
and flights of fancy, as the author of this excellent book in
a brilliant series. _Vulcan_ is a little book, but between
its covers knowledge and vision are pressed down and brimming
over.”—_Spectator._
=Hymen=, or the Future of Marriage. By NORMAN HAIRE.
This candid and unprejudiced survey inquires why the majority
of marriages to-day seem to be so unsatisfactory, and finds the
answer in the sexual ethic of our civilization which is ill adapted
to our social and economic needs. The problems of sex-morality,
sex-education, prostitution, in-breeding, birth-control,
trial-marriage, and polygamy are all touched upon.
=The Next Chapter=: the War against the Moon. By ANDRÉ MAUROIS,
author of ‘Ariel’, etc.
This imaginary chapter of world-history (1951-64) from the pen of
one of the most brilliant living French authors mixes satire and
fancy in just proportions. It tells how the press of the world is
controlled by five men, how world interest is focussed on an attack
on the moon, how thus the threat of world-war is averted. But when
the moon retaliates....
=Galatea=, or the Future of Darwinism. By W. RUSSELL BRAIN.
This non-technical but closely-reasoned book is a challenge to the
orthodox teaching on evolution known as Neo-Darwinism. The author
claims that, although Neo-Darwinian theories can possibly account
for the evolution of forms, they are quite inadequate to explain
the evolution of functions.
=Scheherazade=, or the Future of the English Novel. By JOHN
CARRUTHERS.
A survey of contemporary fiction in England and America lends to
the conclusion that the literary and scientific influences of
the last fifty years have combined to make the novel of to-day
predominantly analytic. It has thus gained in psychological
subtlety, but lost its form. How this may be regained is put
forward in the conclusion.
=Caledonia=, or the Future of the Scots. By G. M. THOMSON.
Exit the Scot! Under this heading the Scottish people are revealed
as a leaderless mob in whom national pride has been strangled. They
regard, unmoved, the spectacle of their monstrous slum-evil, the
decay of their industries, the devastation of their countryside.
This is the most compact and mordant indictment of Scottish policy
that has yet been written.
=Albyn=, or Scotland and the Future. By C. M. GRIEVE, author of
‘Contemporary Scottish Studies’, etc.
A vigorous answer, explicit and implicit, to _Caledonia_,
tracing the movements of a real Scottish revival, in music, art,
literature, and politics, and coming to the conclusion that there
is a chance even now for the regeneration of the Scottish people.
=Lares et Penates=, or the Future of the Home. By H. J. BIRNSTINGL.
All the many forces at work to-day are influencing the planning,
appearance, and equipment of the home. This is the main thesis of
this stimulating volume, which considers also the labour-saving
movement, the ‘ideal’ house, the influence of women, the servant
problem, and the relegation of aesthetic considerations to the
background. Disconcerting prognostications follow.
_NEARLY READY_
=Archon=, or the Future of Government. By HAMILTON FYFE.
A survey of the methods of government in the past leads the author
to a consideration of conditions in the world of to-day. He then
indicates the lines along which progress may develop.
=Hermes=, or the Future of Chemistry. By T. W. JONES, B.SC., F.C.S.
Chemistry as the means of human emancipation is the subject of
this book. To-day chemistry is one of the master factors of our
existence; to-morrow it will dominate every phase of life, winning
for man the goal of all his endeavour, economic freedom. It may
also effect a startling change in man himself.
=The Future of Physics.= By L. L. WHYTE.
The last few years have been a critical period in the development
of physics. We stand on the eve of a new epoch. Physics, biology,
and psychology are converging towards a scientific synthesis of
unprecedented importance whose influence on thought and social
custom will be so profound as to mark a stage in human evolution.
This book interprets these events and should be read in connexion
with _Gallio_, by J. W. N. Sullivan, in this series.
=Ikonoclastes=, or the Future of Shakespeare. By HUBERT GRIFFITHS.
Taking as text the recent productions of classical plays in modern
dress, the author, a distinguished dramatic critic, suggests that
this is the proper way of reviving Shakespeare and other great
dramatists of the past, and that their successful revival in modern
dress may perhaps be taken as an indication of their value.
_IN PREPARATION_
=Bacchus=, or the Future of Wine. By P. MORTON SHAND.
=Mercurius=, or the World on Wings. By C. THOMPSON WALKER.
=The Future of Sport.= By G. S. SANDILANDS.
=The Future of India.= By T. EARLE WELBY.
=The Future of Films.= By ERNEST BETTS.
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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