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 that makes life worth living. It is significant that The Scotsman and 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 with other 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.”
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