THE LOW SCOTCH
I have no desire to offer in the present pages a re-hash of a former
work of mine, which is said to have provoked the Scotch to the point of
laughter. But I do desire to assert that, in my humble opinion, it is
the Scotch, or alien population of Ireland, which has been at the root
of Ireland’s principal troubles throughout the past century. Ulster may
be a fine kingdom, the wealthiest, most industrious, and the wisest and
happiest in the country, if you like. Yet it is Ulster that bars the
way in all matters that make for the real good of Ireland. Every proper
Irishman knows this, and Ulstermen will be at no pains to deny it. Rather
are they disposed to glory in it and to brag about it. Ireland, they will
tell you, is their country. It is they who have made it, they who have
saved it, they who have enriched, beautified and adorned it. They point
to the linen industry and to the shipbuilding industry; they crack about
Belfast and Portadown, and about “eminent Ulstermen in every walk of
life.” There would be no Ireland at all if it were not for themselves.
They rule Ireland. What Ireland wants she may have, if it pleases Ulster.
What Ireland does not want she must have, if Ulster so much as nod. That,
at any rate, is the view of Ulster, the view of the thrifty, douce Scotch
bodies whose fathers got gifts of other people’s lands from James I. of
England and VI. of Scotland, and whose sons go up and down and to and fro
upon the earth, calling themselves “Irishmen of Scotch descent.” There
are no Irishmen of Scotch descent. And Ulstermen are not Irishmen unless
their descent be Irish. Failing this, they are simply interlopers, or,
at best, colonists and plantation men, and they had best put the fact
in their pipes and smoke it. Nobody can deny that it was a bad day for
Ireland when they came grabbing and grubbing to her shores, just as it
was a bad day for England when she “took up” with them. They got Ulster
for nothing, and they have kept it for “that same.” They have lived and
waxed fat on Irish plunder, and the whole force of English legislation
has been directed toward maintaining them in their place, fostering their
projects, pampering and propitiating them, and “protecting” them against
the wicked, degraded, unreasonable Irish outside. Nor have they been
content to confine their greedy attention to their own proper “kingdom,”
which is not theirs. Where the carcass is, there will the vulture be;
and where there is a soft job, or obvious pickings, there you will find
a Scotchman. So that throughout Ireland, Scotchmen have been scattered
wherever the Government could find a place for one. There is scarcely
an office, sub-office, or sub-deputy office worth the having in all
Ireland which has not been made the perquisite of a Protestant Scotchman.
Even the Congested Districts Board employs Scotch factors, and Thom’s
Almanac is little more than a catalogue of Scotch patronymics. And the
pride and insolence and unfairness of them! From a booklet called _The
Scot in Ulster_, written by a Scotchman, and published, if you please,
by Blackwood’s of Edinburgh, I take the following: “Their English and
Scotch origin seems to me to give to the men of Ulster an unalienable
right to protest, as far as they are concerned, against the policy of
separation from Great Britain to which the Irish, with the genius for
nicknames which they possess, at present give the name of Home Rule.”
Could sophistry, craft, subtlety, disingenuousness, or the Scotch genius
for cunning misrepresentation go further? To say that when the Irish
people have said Home Rule they meant separation, is to promulgate a
deliberate and wily untruth. The Irish people proper invariably mean
what they say, no more and no less. Home Rule never meant more nor less
to the Irish than “a parliament on college green.” It was the Scotch, and
the Scotch alone, who set up the cry of “separation” for a bugbear and
a bogy wherewith to frighten the timorous English ruler into stubborn
acquiescence in the Scotch view of Irish affairs. Yet here we have a
Scotchman assuring us in cold print that Home Rule is merely an Irish
“nickname” for “separation.” I note with considerable satisfaction,
however, that, as Scotchmen will, the author of _The Scot in Ulster_
proceeds religiously to give away the whole Scotch-Irish question. “For
centuries,” says he, “the Scot had been wont to wander forth over Europe
in search of _adventure_. [The italic is ours.] As a rule, he turned
his steps where fighting was to be had, _and the pay for killing was
reasonably good_. [Again the italics are ours.]… These Scots who have
flocked from Leith, or Crail, or Berwick to seek fortune, in peace or
war, on the Continent of Europe were mostly the young and adventurous,
for whom the old home life had become too narrow. _They took with them
little save their own stout hearts and their national long heads_.
[These, too, are our italics.]… The time arrived at last, however, when
war with England ceased, and internal strife became less bloody, and
Scotland began to be too small for her rapidly growing population, _for
in those days food did not necessarily come where there were mouths
to consume it_. [Italics—of our own—which famine-stricken Ireland may
fittingly ponder.] Then the Scots, true to the race from which they
sprung—for ‘Norman, and Saxon, and Dane are we’ [think of it!][2]—began
to go forth, like the northern hordes in days of yore, the women and
the children along with the bread-winners, and crossed the seas, and
settled in new lands, and were ‘fruitful and multiplied and replenished
the earth,’ until the globe is circled round with colonies which are
of our blood, and which love and cherish the old ‘land of the mountain
and the flood.’” [Tut, tut!] And now mark us: “It was in the beginning
of the seventeenth century that the first of these swarms crossed the
narrowest of the seas which surround Scotland; it went out from the
Ayrshire and Galloway ports, and settled in the north of Ireland. The
numbers which went were large. They left Scotland at a time when she was
deeply moved by the great Puritan revival. They took with them their
Scottish character and their Scottish Calvinism. [Clearly they had both
hands full!] They founded the Scottish colony in Ulster. Thus it comes to
pass ‘That the foundation of Ulster society is Scottish. It is the solid
granite on which it rests.’ [Glory be!] The history of this Scottish
colony seems worth telling, for it is a story of which any Scotsman at
home or abroad may be proud. [Where is my crimson handkerchief?] Its
early history is _quaint_ and _interesting_ [our italics]; there is much
_suffering_ and _oppression_ in the story of the succeeding years [our
italics]; but there are flashes of brightness to relieve the gloom. _The
men which this race of Scotsmen has produced are worthy of the parent
stock; the contribution which this branch of the Scottish nation has
made to the progress of civilization proves that it has not forgotten
the old ideals; the portion of Ireland which these Scotsmen HOLD is so
prosperous and contented that it permits our statesmen to forget that
it is part of that most ‘distressful’ country._” I venture to thank
Heaven and St. Patrick that the statements we have last italicized and
the word we have put in capital letters embody the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth. Examine them, O sons of Erin, and take
heed that You are the people, and that the Scotch are but the sons of
Belial and Astoreth. What has holy Ireland to do with these vapors,
these swaggerings, these smitings of righteous breasts? Who be the
grubby, grimy, gallowayan, grasping, governmental hucksters that so by
implication and innuendo contemn You, the proper and legitimate owners of
Ulster? Ask of the winds, which far around strew Scotchmen and the devil
on the fair places of the earth. You are innocent to put up with it. You
fought the landlords and beat them hollow. “We conquered you before, and
can do so again!” Be done with this Scotch obsession. Good can come out
of Ireland and Irishmen, as well as out of Ulster and Scotchmen. Lo,
that green island is yours, not theirs. Seven-tenths of it are in your
hands to do with as you will. “There is not, perhaps, another country on
the face of the globe where more good, solid work is waiting to be done,
where greater capacities lie dormant, yet where trifling of all kinds
so abounds.” That is the verdict of an Irishman and an Irish Catholic
upon you. In sober truth you groan, as England groans, under the Scotch
superstition. Nobody can be prosperous in Ireland save Scotchmen. Nobody
can manufacture but Scotchmen, nobody can farm but Scotchmen. The view is
entirely false. Encourage it no longer; remember who you are, and make an
end of trifling.
[2] In point of fact the Scotch are neither Norman, Saxon, Dane nor good
red-herring, but sheer Scotch.