I propose to point out a few of the chief causes of internal difference which act both in England and France. The first and most obvious is that neither of the two nations is homogeneous. They are formed by the joining together of old nations, they have not grown as single nations from the first.
La Grande Bretagne.
The Scotch Highlanders.
Their Inertia.
Lack of Enterprise.
Highlanders naturally Gentlemen.
The power which acts politically in Europe, and which is called l’Angleterre or la Grande Bretagne in diplomatic correspondence, is composed of four distinct nationalities. If we take one of these, the most northerly, we find that it is inhabited by two distinct races, the Highlanders and Lowlanders. They are spoken of equally as Scotch, yet the difference is not less marked, in reality, than if they were separate nations. The Highlanders still retain, or did retain when I knew them, many of the characteristics of a social state from which the Lowlanders have long since emerged. They were noble rather than industrial in their tastes and instincts, disposed for field sports rather than for the improvement of their condition by labour. Dr. Macculloch’s description of their inertia at the beginning of the century was still applicable. The people did not move, of themselves, towards a better condition; they had not the spirit of improvement. They were surrounded, it is true, by natural circumstances of some difficulty, especially those caused by the severity of their climate, but they were far from making the most of such opportunities as they possessed. For example, in gardening, they did not grow, and they could not be induced to grow, the vegetables which the climate allows, even although the want of them brought on scurvy. Their habitations were wanting in every comfort, being almost in the lowest stage of cottage-building, irregular walls of rude stone, with a small hole (glazed, however) for a window, and a low thatch, the fire very commonly on the floor, and the peat reek escaping through an opening in the roof. There was no spirit of enterprise to improve the ground about the habitations, or to make communication easier when the public road (itself due to English military energy) did not happen to be close at hand. In a word, there was nothing of that fruitful discontent which leads the advancing races to incessant improvements. Without the neighbourhood of the Lowland Scotch and the visits of the English, the Highlanders would certainly have remained in a very early stage of civilisation. That early stage has its qualities and merits. The Highlanders have good manners. Poor or rich, they are naturally gentlemen, and they show a fine endurance of hardship which, from the stoic and heroic side, is evidently superior to the love of luxury that develops itself so wonderfully in the South.
Absence of the Fine Arts in the Highlands.
Poverty of Highland Literature.
The Highlanders have, of themselves, no fine arts. Their degree of civilisation has developed no ecclesiastical architecture; they got no further than the building of a few rude small castles. They have not any graphic arts, and in those industrial products which are akin to art they have never got beyond the design of a brooch or the arrangement of the crossing stripes in a plaid. Their vernacular literature consists of little more than a few poems, said to be touching and pathetic in their simplicity. The one literary success in connection with the Highlands has been Macpherson’s Ossian.