“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 Scottishnationality, 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 politicalleaders 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-pervasivesuppressio veri, suggestio falsithe 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 strongprima facieevidence that if, as is commonly contended, Scotland has owed a great deal materialistically (whatever it may havelost 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 necessaryto 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 fragmentarilyand 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,” andhas 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 evenThe Glasgow Heralddoes not, and cannot, permit signed correspondence on such subjects as Scottish music or drama, for example (let alone politics), if these goagainst 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’sLetters 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 Roseberydidconcede that Scotland is “the milch cow of the Empire.” There has appeared no Scotsman since of equalsize 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.