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, almostinvariably, 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 isobviously 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 programmemust 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, merelyas 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 psychologicaloutrage. 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 alreadyclear 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. Itis not surprisingto 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 demonstratethe 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 representedthe 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 clearlythat, 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 thecombinazione, 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 calledjunctura 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.