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?”
“Eighth marvel of seven on earth,A Douglas at peace?”
“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-hatingdemocracy—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 sideof 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 itdiscuss 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 thatmakes life worth living. It is significant thatThe Scotsmanand 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 withother 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.”