Had there been such a Homecroft Reserve in Scotland, with a million men enlisted in it and fully organized, officered, and equipped for instant service in the field, Germany would have pondered long before starting this war. Would not the German people, as well as the English, be glad now if the war had never been started? But if, notwithstanding all this, the war had been started, an army of a million brave and hardy Scots would have been on the firing line before the German columns had got past Louvain. Belgium would have been protected from devastation. There would have been no invasion of France.
But the English people stubbornly refused to heed warnings of the danger of war with Germany.
We are doing the same with reference to Japan.
The English with stolid, self-satisfied complacency pinned their faith entirely on their navy as a national defense.
We are doing practically the same thing, with reference to Japan.
And now the English have been awakened by an appalling national catastrophe which was preventable.
Must we be awakened in the same way?
A Scotch Homecroft Reserve of a million men would have been an almost certain guarantee that no war would have broken out; and if it had, such a Homecroft Reserve would have been worth to England the billions of dollars she is now spending in a paroxysm of haste to train a million soldiers for service on the continent and to conduct the war. The Scotch Homecroft Reserve would have had the added value of being thoroughly trained and hardened troops as compared with the new levies they are now training to be soldiers. Those raw levies of volunteers, many from clerical employments, lack the qualities that would have been furnished by the Scotch Highlanders, or the descendants of forty generations of border-raiders, or the hardy fishermen of the Sea Coast and Islands of Scotland. Some idea of the sort of men who would have composed this Scotch Homecroft Reserve that England might have had, may be gained from the following very brief story of the Gordon Highlanders which appeared in the "Kansas City Times" of October 27, 1914:
"Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?
(Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.)
The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there.
(Highlanders! March! By the right!)
There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air:
There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare;
But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
When they hear their pipes playing.
—'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt.