previous year under all the important classes into which crime and
offences are grouped, the number of persons charged has risen to close
upon 180,000, and if we compare this with the last published English
tables for the year 1899, we shall find, for equal numbers of population,
Scotland has over three charges for every two in England.
“Furthermore, imprisonments in Scotland continue to be proportionately
much higher than in England, and for every three committals in England
there are seven in Scotland. The increase in criminal offences during
1900 is distributed under the following heads”:
Culpable homicide 28
Assaults of husbands on wives 690
Cruel and unnatural treatment of children 242
Housebreaking of all kinds 190
Theft 1,916
Malicious mischief 986
Betting games and lotteries 96
Breach of the peace, etc. 519
Cruelty to animals 145
Offences in relation to dogs 148
Drunkenness 5,785
Offences against Elementary Education Acts 397
Army deserters 1,207
Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regulations 9,570
Prostitution 613
Bicycling, etc, offences 367
Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road Act offences 2,664
Public Health Act offences 162
Lodging without consent of owner under Vagrancy Acts 425
------
26,150
It will thus be seen that theft and drunkenness bear the gree among
Scotch crimes, while the large number of offences against police acts,
by-laws, and regulations tends to show that the Scot is not a good
citizen. The mere statistics as to crime, however, do not give one
anything like an adequate idea of the general depravity of the Scotch
character. To understand it properly we must add to the criminal returns
the illegitimacy returns.
From Dr. Albert Leffingwell’s[16] book on illegitimacy I take the
following passage:
“In 1881 the census of Scotland showed that there were then living in
that portion of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women (that is to say,
spinsters and widows) between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. During
the ten years 1878-87 there were born in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate
children, or an annual average of twenty-one to each thousand unmarried
females at this specified age. In England and Wales the corresponding
number of the unmarried females was 3,046,431, and the number of
illegitimate births during the same period was 426,184, or fourteen
to each thousand of the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number of
unmarried women at this age was a third larger than in Scotland, or
731,767. Yet to each thousand of these were born every year less than
five illegitimate children during a ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again
we are perplexed with the problem why Scotia and Hibernia should present
such widely different contrasts. Every year in Scotland there are _five
times the proportion_ of bastards that see the light in Ireland!”
Dr. Leffingwell’s perplexity is the perplexity of the scientific person.
That Burns should have anything to do with illegitimacy of Scotia would
probably seem ridiculous to the scientific mind, but I believe that
Burns, and the spirit of loose living for which he stands, have been to
no little extent responsible for bringing Scotland to the discreditable
and degrading pass indicated by Dr. Leffingwell’s figures.
In Ireland the rate of illegitimacy is 4.4, in Scotland, 21.5 to each
thousand unmarried women. Now, the poet who stands in the same relation
to the Irish people as Burns does to the Scotch is Thomas Moore. He has
given Ireland quite as considerable a body of songs as Burns has given
to Scotland. He is just as essentially Irish as Burns is Scotch; but
compare the tone of the two men. One of them gives you _The lass who made
the bed to me_, the other, _Rich and rare were the gems she wore_. In
reading Burns you find that quite two thirds of what he has written is
marred by unpleasant and libidinous suggestion, but there is not a line
of Moore which would not pass muster in a ladies’ school. To the rantin’
roarin’ Billies of Scotland the difference may form material for a sneer,
but in the long run, clearly, the advantage is with the women of Ireland.
If Scotland wishes to get rid of her drunkenness and to lessen the crime
which arises out of it, and if she wishes to bring herself into line with
the ordinary standards of decency, she will, I am afraid, have to put a
little less trust in that mighty performer before the Flesh—Robert Burns.
XIV
THE SCOT BY ADOPTION
I have been told that there are two kinds of Scotchmen, and that it
would be a mistake to confound them, or to suggest that they have any
characteristics in common. One kind, and the best kind, I am assured, is
the Highlander. The other—and the more disreputable kind—is the Scotchman
of the Lowlands. I have met both sorts, and I have not been able to
discover that there is much to choose between them. For all practical
purposes the blood is identical. It may at one time have been of two
distinct strains, but these appear to have become in a great measure
fused, and the blend is not beautiful. I think it was Dr. Cunninghame
Graham who said of a certain Scotch peddler that he looked like a cross
between a low-class Indian and an ourang-outang that had somehow got
itself baptised. This, no doubt, is a little severe. But a Scotchman
does certainly make one feel that underneath his unsatisfactory and
obviously imperfect civilisation the hairy simian sits and grins. Rouse
him, thwart him, disappoint him, rally him, and suddenly your cross-eyed,
sandy-haired, bandy-legged, but withal sleek, smug, moralising man
suddenly “bleezes,” and you perceive in him the ten thousand devils of
an ancient and arboreal barbarity. Whether he be Highlander or Lowlander
or mongrel, as he mostly is, it is just the same. He is Scotch and
compounded for the most part of savage. Like the converted Kroo-boy, he
may at any time revert into his immemorial primalism and you can never
be sure of him. Whether he hail from the Isles or from the Lothians, the
Scot is just the Scot, and there is nothing more to be said for him.
There is, however, a kind of Scot who, while not of Scotch blood, has
adopted the manners and habits of Caledonia, and is rather flattered if
you take him for a true-born Scotchman. This type of creature usually
owes his retrogression to the fact that he has married a Scotch wife.
Of Scotchwomen as a body, I do not wish to say anything that will be
considered ungallant. If one passes over their abnormal capacity for
thrift, I suppose they are pretty much the same as other women. So far as
I am aware I have not met more than a dozen Scotchwomen in my life. Two
of them I have known intimately, and I have always thanked my stars that
I was not married to either of them. But to return to our Scotchman by
adoption. Usually, as I say, he is married to a Scotchwoman. Before you
arrive at a knowledge of this circumstance, you are inclined to wonder
what is the matter with him. His style and proclivities have induced you
to set him down for a Scotchman, yet you find that his Doric is bad,
that he eats his porridge with sugar and takes his whiskey with soda,
and that he was born in Gloucestershire. Also, he tells you frankly
that his parents were not Scotch, and he adds, with a look of supreme
satisfaction, “but my wife is.” And straightway he plunges into tender
reminiscences of the days of his courtship, touches modestly upon the
wealth and importance of his wife’s relations, hints at the fearful
expense to which he was put by his many journeys North when he went
a-wooing, and gurgles with a sickly smile that it was worth the trouble,
and that he does not know “what he would do without her.” All of which is
mightily interesting. If you pursue your investigations further, you will
find that the man is perhaps a little more to pity than to blame. He has
been compelled to become as Scotch as he knows how, willy-nilly. At the
head of his table sits the daughter of Scotia—ruddy, chapped, and sharp
of tongue; she looks down on things English, her husband included; her
children are taught to remember that their grandfather is a provost and
magnificent in the jute line; she keeps her house in the Scotch manner,
her servants are Scotch, her household linens are Scotch, her beef is
Scotch, and her whiskey is Scotch; her little boys wear tartan; tripe is
the great dish for supper, and her husband must eat oatmeal to the verge
of scrofula. Abroad, too, this man must be as Scotch as the best of them.
In his place of business, Scotchmen _protégés_ of his wife’s relations
are the only ware: he loathes them, and they laugh at him behind his
back, but he has to put up with them. On Saturdays they instruct him in
the mysteries of “gowf”; on Mondays they tell one another what a “damned
foozler” he is. His holidays are always spent in the Western Highlands;
he is everlastingly seeing his wife off to Aberdeen; he banks at the
Bank of Scotland; he smokes the tobacco which has been so ably pushed
into fame by Dr. J. M. Barrie; he believes that the Glasgow bailies know
what they are about; his money, which has been scraped together on the
Scotch principle, is doucely put away in Scotch ventures; and altogether
Scotland does very well out of him. The fact that he is a mean little
man does not worry him. The practice and view of life which the lady of
his affections has forced upon him is bringing him a due share of this
world’s gear, and in that fact he takes consolation for his attenuated
honesty, his lost manhood, and his lost nationality. This is one side of
the picture and the brightest.
On the other side it were well for us not to look too closely. The
Englishman who has been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not always
succeed in profiting by the worldly wisdom with which his spouse would
imbue him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotchwoman who cannot report
to her kindred in Scotland that her husband is “getting on” feels
that she has been robbed of the prime joy of existence. Her contempt
for the man who cannot win and grip siller eats into her soul, until
she has no other sentiment left. Bit by bit she develops into a scold
and a curtain-lecturer; the man who found her so fair by the Birks of
Aberfeldey becomes a furtive wanderer from her side, and it all ends in
too much whiskey, recrimination, and execration. I know an Englishman
of parts who has never earned enough money to be under the necessity of
paying income tax. He is a man of small stature and limp, and he has a
great fear in his eyes. He is one of those men who might have done things
and have omitted to do them. The gossip about him is that he is badly
married. Once I saw his wife. She was a big, raw-boned Scotchwoman, with
a heavy accent on her. It was New Year’s Eve, and she had evidently been
“tasting.” At sight of me, out of the bigness of her Scotch hospitality,
she proposed a “nep,” and half filled three glasses from a stone bottle.
Then, with hand on hip, glass uplifted, and a blaze on her face, she
cried: “Here’s tae us and to hell with the English.” We drank the toast
in something of a silence. Later, when I was about to leave, my limp
friend would have accompanied me to the door. But the mistress of his
heart would have none of it. “Ye’ll awa’,” she said, then, “to yer bed;
yer friend is no’ that fou but he can find his ain way oot.” So that we
shook hands and parted on the stair. The man had had twenty years of it.
I understand him.
The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and speaking with an accent for
the mere sake of it is scarcely worth notice. But there are such people
even outside Colney Hatch. What they see in the Scotch to admire to the
point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of me make out. The garb
of old Gaul is, no doubt, very fetching from the point of view of the
weak-minded, but of its effeminacy there can be no doubt. Really, it is
a costume for small and pretty boys who are too young to be breeched.
In view of its associations and of its innate childishness,—not to say
immodesty,—it is a great pity that any Englishman should go out of his
way to wear it.
XV
THE SCOT AND ENGLAND
Although the political relations between Scotland and England would
seem to have been of the smoothest since the Act of Union, and in spite
of the fact that on the whole the merging of the two peoples under one
Government has tended hugely to the benefit of Scotland, it is the Scotch
fashion to lament the Union with groans and to insist that 1707 was a
black year for Scotchmen. I believe that were it not for the circumstance
that Scotland cannot produce capable men even in the way of agitators
we should soon have at St. Stephen’s a Scotch party which would be just
as troublesome and just as noisy and truculent as is the Irish party. I
believe, too, that within twelve months’ time as big a demand for Home
Rule and as much disquiet and rebellion could be got up in Scotland as
have ever existed in Ireland. Fortunately, however, the Scotch possess
neither the requisite agitators nor the requisite pluck to indulge in
serious demonstrations against the Imperial Government. So that they have
to content themselves with futile grumbling and petty acts of disloyalty.
The Scot has always been more or less of a fine hand at a treason. Out
of Scotland has come the only treasonable organisation which England can
boast of at the present day. I refer, of course, to that absurd group of
persons who once a year decorate the statue of Charles I. at Whitehall
with cheap wreaths, and circulate leaflets which profess to prove that
the reigning monarch in these realms is a usurper, and that our only
true monarch is a woman by the name of Mary, who lives somewhere on
the Continent. In any country but England these gentry would be laid
by the heels; though the mere fact that they are Scotch renders them
quite ineffective. We can afford to smile at them. All the same, we
must remember that if they could make trouble they would. Even in the
matter of the King’s Coronation the Scotch have managed to give us the
usual display of stupid insolence. Writing to his paper in May last, the
Scottish correspondent of the _Times_ said:
“The approaching coronation of the King and Queen seems to have awakened
rather less enthusiasm in certain quarters than either the Jubilee or
the Diamond Jubilee of her late Majesty. It would be absurd to make much
of the difference, but it does exist. In a word, the celebration of the
event will be distinctly more official than the rejoicings over the two
notable epochs of Queen Victoria’s later life. Two circumstances have
helped to bring this about—the Royal proclamation of two successive
holidays, and what is known in Scotland as the ‘numeral.’ They are
both absolutely sentimental considerations, but they have had a slight
influence. Trades councils, becoming ‘permeated’ with Socialism,
protest against what they are pleased to call the ‘mummery’ in London,
and the association of themselves therewith through local rejoicings,
and the idea of losing two days’ pay in one week is just sufficient to
arouse their resentment, which some corporations have tried to appease
by ignoring the proclamation, or applying it, on their own initiative,
to one of the days only. The ‘numeral’ connotes the quasi-patriotic
objection to the assumption of the title of King Edward VII. by his
Majesty. Some Scotsmen persist in refusing to see that, in calling
himself the Seventh Edward, the King neither intended to, nor did,
insinuate that he was the seventh of that name who had reigned over the
United Kingdom, and they declaim in grotesque fashion against the payment
of any kind of homage to the Crown. Their insignificance is shown by the
snub administered to them recently by the Convention of Burghs, which
is nothing if it is not truly and characteristically Scottish: their
influence is no less unmistakable in the resolution of several public
bodies to omit the ‘numeral’ from the inscription on their coronation
medals, and in the untimely fits of economy that have overcome some local
authorities not as a rule averse to feasting.”
It is the old tale over again. The Scotch braggart cry—“unconquered
and unconquerable”—is made to rend the welkin whenever the opportunity
serves. Edward the Seventh, of course, cannot be Edward the Seventh of
Scotland. It would never do. Therefore the “numeral” must not appear
on Scotch medals, and the rejoicings are to be as far as possible of
an official character. The ululation over the loss of two days’ pay
also is eminently Scotch. There is a time for work and a time for play,
says the wise man; but the whey-faced Scot plays always with a certain
disconsolateness because he feels that he is losing money all the
time. The fact is, that Scottish life and Scottish manners are almost
entirely dominated by the more evil traits of the Scotch character.
Independence and thrift must be read into everything the Scotchman does.
Poverty-stricken, starveling pride has been the ruin of the Scottish
people. It has made many of them sour, disagreeable, greedy, and
disloyal; it has made some of them hypocrites and crafty rogues; it has
narrowed their minds and stunted their national development; it has made
them a by-word and a mock in all the countries of the world, and it has
brought them to opprobrium even among Turks and Chinamen.
The career of the Scotchman in England has been picturesquely summarised
by Dr. Cunninghame Graham:
“In the blithe times of clans and moss-troopers [he says], when Jardines
rode and Johnstones raised, when Grahams stole, McGregors plundered, and
Campbells prayed themselves into fat sinecures, we were your enemies.
In stricken fields you southern folks used to discomfit us by reason of
your archers and your riders sheathed in steel. We on the borders had
the vantage of you, as you had cattle for us to steal, houses to burn,
and money and valuables for us to carry off. We having none, you were
not in a state to push retaliation in an effective way. Later, we sent
an impecunious king to govern you, and with him went a train of ragged
courtiers, all with authentic pedigrees but light of purse. From this
time date the Sawnies and the Sandies, the calumnies about our cuticle,
and those which stated that we were so tender-hearted that we scrupled
to deprive of life the smallest insect which we had about our clothes.
You found our cheekbones out, saw our red hair, and noted that we blew
our noses without a pocket-handkerchief, to save undue expense.… So far
so good. But still you pushed discovery to whiskey, haggis, sneeshin,
predestination, and all the other mysteries both of our cookery and our
faith. The bagpipes burst upon you (with a skirl), and even Shakespeare
set down things about them which I refrain from quoting, only because I
do not wish to frighten gentlewomen.… King George came in, in pudding
time, and all was changed, and a new race of Scotsmen dawned on the
English view. The ’15 and the ’45 sent out the Highlanders, rough-footed
and with deerskin thongs tied round their heads, … they marched and
conquered and made England reel, retreated, lost Culloden, and the mist
received them back. But their brief passage altered your views again, and
you perceived that Scotland was not all bailie, prayer-monger, merchant,
and sanctimonious cheat.… Then Scott arose and threw a glamour over
Scotland which was nearly all his own. True, we were poor, but then our
poverty was so romantic, and we appeared fighting for home and haggis,
for foolish native kings, for hills, for heather, freedom, and for all
those things which Englishmen enjoy to read about, but which in actual
life they take good care only themselves shall share. The pale-faced
master and the Highland chief, the ruined gentleman, the swashbuckler,
soldier, faithful servant, and the rest, he marked and made his own, but
then he looked about to find his counterfoil, the low comedians without
whose presence every tragedy must halt.
“Then came the Kailyarders, and said that Scott was Tory, Jacobite,
unpatriotic, unpresbyterian, and they alone could draw the Scottish type.
England believed them, and their large sale and cheap editions clinched
it, and to-day a Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool, a canting
cheat, a grave, sententious man, dressed in a ‘stan o’ black,’ oppressed
with the tremendous difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and,
above all, weighed down with the responsibilities of being Scotch.”
As I have already mentioned, Dr. Cunninghame Graham is a Scot.
The whole truth about the Scotch relation with England is that the
Scot is more than sensible of the advantage it brings him, but being
by disposition wise as a serpent, he is afraid that if he did not
pretend to deplore it, it might not last in its present comfortable
unrestrictedness. Of course, this fear is entirely baseless. The
Englishman is too easy hearted to make laws against needy aliens whether
from north of the Tweed or elsewhere. All the same, the Scot continues
to howl on principle. He will not have our King, he will not have the
“numeral,” to call him English or even include him under the term British
is an indignity and an outrage. The Act of Union was a big mistake: the
poor Scot has been trodden down forbye ever since, and altogether he is
sorry that he is alive. And, for my own part, I am quite inclined to
think that there is much to be said for the latter sentiment.
XVI
THE WAY OUT