Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries, useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers. Idly retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish rights and sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen got up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen. This apart, however, most of our grievances may be comfortably digested by chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull’s own spirit of easy good-nature.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts:
Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet.
And all that Nature made thine own,
Floating in air, or pent in stone,
Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea,
And like thy shadow follow thee.
The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has been like to merge in England’s greater one, to which smart a plaster must be applied in the revived title of Britain. No school-book would sell north of the Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of England. Yet we cannot play the censor on the speech of our Continental neighbours, who denounce as England the power that has ruled the waves to their loss; and it is England which so many sons and dependents, in so wide regions of the world, speak of as “home.” In the London Library some vague hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish History a separate department; but one notes with concern how works on the Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England, while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this slight to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the English poets!
It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should come to be best known by the name of the prominent partner. One never could be expected to style Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in full, unless by way of formal address; had it been no more than Dodson and Fogg, one might make shift at an Austria-Hungary bracketing. Lord Bute is accused of prompting George III. to pride in being born a Briton; but the grievance seems more philosophically handled in a story of two Sandy tars at Trafalgar, one of whom found fault with Nelson’s famous signal: “‘England expects’—aye, but nothing about poor old Scotland!” was his grumble. “Hoots!” answered his comrade, “don’t they know that every Scotsman is sure to do his duty?”
I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland has got quite her share of practical benefit from the “sad and sorrowful Union,” and need not grudge to England the nominal advantages of size and wealth, which the latter sometimes appears to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So long as Scottish enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play on both sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost titles and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time’s dustbin. When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow subjects with our best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our dark record of feuds and slaughter and bigotry falls into its place in the background of a grander scene, and that instead of cherishing thistly independence as a romantic Norway or an austere Portugal, we merge our national life into the greater kingdom’s, which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to stand so high in the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison would fit better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah.
True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate unenlightened patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process defined by Herbert Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind, while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with the substance of its old discords.
Where is this reactionary Particularismus to stop? There are parts of Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were independent of each other, some that still are as different from one another in blood and speech, as most of Scotland is from England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan awake its overlaid individuality? May not Galloway and Strathclyde set up for recognition of their ex-independence? Then why not encourage Strathbogie, the Cumbraes, the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of Gandercleugh, to lament upon the fate that has made them members of one greater body? Nay, now that the clans are broken up, could they not contrive to respin their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of national patriotism? Such reductio ad absurdum is worth thinking about, when at this moment there are signs of relapse in the long convalescence from that Jacobite fever that “carried” hard heads as well as soft hearts, and set old grudges against the Union flaunting in plaid and philibeg.
I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many and serious. Of old, Fibh had kings of its own, of such immemorial antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The dialect of Fife, mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old Scottish Church was at St. Andrews, where arose the first northern university, the local Saint Regulus being supplanted by that apostle who, according to scoffers, was chosen as Scotland’s patron because of the keen eye he showed on earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant days, several of the religious leaders—Knox, the Melvilles, the Erskines, John Glas, Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers—were all either natives of or sojourners in Fife. This