Of the poor, mean, despised, insulted Scot,
came to be the subject of banter, more or less good humoured. The Englishman, while retaining a due sense of his own superiority, learnt to acknowledge that his northern neighbour did really possess some good qualities which made him not unworthy of a place in the commonwealth, while the Scot, on his side, discovered that his ‘auld enemies’ of England were far from being all mere ‘pock-puddings.’ As the result of this greater intimacy of association, the smaller nation was necessarily drawn more and more to assimilate itself to the speech and ways of its larger, wealthier, and more advanced partner.
But the decline in Scottish national peculiarities during the hundred years that followed Culloden was slow compared with that of the second epoch, which dates from the first half of last century, when steam as a motive power came into use, rapidly transforming our manufacturing industries, and revolutionising the means of locomotion, alike on land and sea. Scott in his youth saw the relics of the older time while they were still fairly fresh and numerous, and he has left an imperishable memorial of them in his vivid descriptions. Cockburn beheld the last of these relics disappear, and as he lived well on into the second of the two periods, he could mark and has graphically chronicled the accelerated rate of change.
SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Those of us who, like myself, can look back across a vista of more than three score years, and will compare what they see and hear around them now with what they saw and heard in their childhood, will not only realise that the social revolution has been marching along, but will be constrained to admit that its advance has been growing perceptibly more rapid. They must feel that the old order has indeed changed, and though they may wish that the modern could establish itself with less effacement of the antique, and may be disposed with Byron to cry,
Out upon Time! who for ever will leave
But enough of the past for the future to grieve,
they have, at least, the consolation of reflecting that the changes have been, on the whole, for the better. Happily much of the transformation is, after all, external. The fundamental groundwork of national character and temperament continues to be but little affected. The surface features and climate of the country, with all their profound, if unperceived, influences on the people, remain with no appreciable change. Even the inevitable wave of evolution does not everywhere roll on with the same speed, but leaves outlying corners and remote parishes unsubmerged, where we may still light upon survivals of an older day, in men and women whose ways and language seem to carry us back a century or more, and in customs that link us with an even remoter past.
MODES OF TRAVEL
It would be far beyond my purpose to enter into any discussion of the connection between the causes that have given rise to these social changes and the effects that have flowed from them. The far-reaching results of the introduction of steam-machinery in aggregating communities around a few centres, in depopulating the country districts, and in altering the habits and physique of the artizans, open up a wide subject on which I do not propose to touch. My life has been largely passed in the rural and mountainous parts of the country, where increased facilities for locomotion have certainly been the most obvious direct source of change to the inhabitants, though other causes have undoubtedly contributed less directly to bring about the general result. It has been my good fortune to become acquainted with every district of Scotland. There is not a county, hardly a parish, which I have not wandered over again and again. In many of them I have spent months at a time, finding quarters in county towns, in quiet villages, in wayside inns, in country houses, in remote manses, in shepherds’ shielings, and in crofters’ huts. Thrown thus among all classes of society, I have been brought in contact with each varying phase of life of the people. During the last twenty years, though no longer permanently resident in Scotland, I have been led by my official duties to revisit the country every year, even to its remotest bounds. I have also been enabled, through the kindness of a yachting friend, to cruise all through the Inner and Outer Hebrides. These favourable opportunities have allowed me to mark the gradual decline of national peculiarities perhaps more distinctly than would have been possible to one continuously resident. As a slight contribution to the history of the social evolution in Scotland, I propose in the following chapters to gather together such reminiscences as may serve to indicate the nature and extent of the changes of which I have been a witness, and to record a few illustrations of the manners and customs, the habits and humour of the people with whom I have mingled.