Scots M.P.s and their constituents that such measures should have to
be supinely forgone; the realities of the Scottish national position
treated as unrealities while the catch-vote tactics of professional
politics are permitted to monopolize public and Parliamentary
attention; and the whole principle of democracy in regard to
Scottish affairs stultified in this obscure but overwhelming fashion.
Somehow or other the situation must be changed, so that measures
corresponding to the actual requirements of our nation can be carried
into the field of practical politics—and not allowed to “fail to
carry” in this way. The whole impression of Scottish politics is like
that of a man dominated by a sort of a nightmare he cannot shake
off. He would fain get back to his true self—but he cannot move.
Just as reading certain papers one gets a wholly disproportionate
and unfortunate conception of the world as a place where murders,
divorces and all sorts of sensations and scandals are dominant—so the
present political system entirely distorts and misrepresents the real
condition of Scottish affairs and bogs the attention of the electors
in all manner of “professional political” issues which have little or
no bearing on their interests, while the latter are excluded from the
“sphere of practical politics.” What is wanted is a movement to shake
off all the old shibboleths, the tyranny of the catch-phrases; and
to found a new conception of politics on the basis of a practical
concentration upon the actualities of our national situation.
The Scottish Protestant Churches have manifested increasing alarm for
several years over what has become known as the “Irish Invasion” of
Scotland. There is no dispute as to the facts. The Irish population
is rapidly increasing; the native Scottish population is rapidly
declining. The former is mainly confined to the big industrial
centres; the latter is leaving the cities, but to a still greater
extent is leaving the countryside. The position is that, owing to
Irish, and other alien immigration, our urban congestion is not being
relieved by the continual drain of emigration. All that is happening
is that a certain proportion of Scottish people is being replaced
there annually by an equivalent of un-Scottish people. While this is
happening in the towns, which, despite all the emigration, continue
to show 50 per cent. more unemployment than in England, our rural
areas are being steadily depopulated of their irreplaceable native
peasantry—and nobody is taking their place. The seriousness of the
matter on either count cannot be exaggerated. But the vital thing
is not the influx of Irish and other aliens, but the exodus of
Scots. It is due to our present economic system—to the condition of
Scottish industries on the one hand which renders them incapable of
paying adequate wages to Scottish employees and ready, therefore, to
supplant them with cheaper Irish labour, and, on the other hand, to
the lack of a progressive and native agricultural policy. The causes
are political and economic, and if the consequences have religious
and social bearings, these should not lead to any misconception as
to the causes and any confusion as to how these can, and should be,
dealt with. Sectarian trouble, for example, over a purely economic
question, is not likely to help matters. This is the danger some
of the Scottish Protestant Ministers are running. Their failure to
penetrate to the real causes is blinding them to the only solution.
That solution is a re-orientation of Scottish affairs on such a basis
that Scottish industries and interests would not be systematically
sacrificed to English, but developed in accordance with the
particular requirements of Scotland, as they could be developed if
Scotland were not compelled to pay, as it is under the present
system, upwards of £120,000,000 per annum to the Imperial Exchequer,
out of which it receives back only some £30,000,000. If the Scottish
contribution were equitably applied, many millions a year would
become available for Scottish commercial and industrial developments,
and not only could the flow of Scottish emigration overseas be
arrested, but a stream back to Scotland would speedily set in if
Scotland could offer its exiled people anything like the conditions
they are obtaining in the colonies. They did not want to emigrate.
Economic conditions forced them. Only economic conditions can bring
them back. This will never happen so long as a system is applied
which is willing to spend £2,000 in settling a Scots overseas,
but unwilling to spend £1,000 to settle him at home—although the
percentage of such home settlements as have been effected (a
miserably small percentage of the applications) which has been
successful has been much greater than amongst overseas settlements,
relatively expensive as the latter are. Most important of all is the
necessity for devising and financing a thorough-going agricultural
policy for Scotland, designed to do for it, in accordance with its
specific requirements, something like what Denmark and other small
nations have achieved for themselves by co-operative methods. But
what hope is there for the initiation of any such policy under the
present system? Scottish Independence is an indispensable preliminary
to any attempt to solve Scottish problems in such a fashion as may
arrest the deplorable efflux of Scottish people and the progressive
dereliction of the Scottish soil.
Dealing with the question of Irish Immigration, the Committee on
Church and Nation of the Established Church of Scotland says: “There
are only two explanations of the great racial problem that has arisen
in Scotland—the emigration of the Scots and the immigration of the
Irish people. There does not seem to be any hope of alleviation of
this problem in the future. All available evidence points to its
intensification. The outlook for the Scottish race is exceedingly
grave. If ever there was a call to the Church of Scotland to stand
fast for what men rightly contend dearest—their nationality and
their traditions—that call is surely sounding now, when our race
and our culture are faced with a peril which, though silent and
unostentatious, is the gravest with which the Scottish people has
ever been confronted.”
This is true—but not exactly in the sense the Committee intends.
It will not do to identify Scottish nationality and traditions
wholly with Protestantism. There has always been a considerable
native Catholic population, and most of the finest elements in our
traditions, in our literature, in our national history, come down
from the days when Scotland was wholly Catholic. Neither, in speaking
of a “silent and unostentatious peril” will it do to overlook the
fact that Scotland has been steadily subject to Anglicization ever
since the Union. This, since it does not raise the “religious bogey”
in the way the Irish immigration does, is apt to be overlooked, but
it should have at least as much attention as the other from the
“Scottish” Churches, if at last they are seriously concerned with
Scottish nationalism, and not merely with a sectarian issue. Until
they face the whole issue of Scottish Nationalism and define what
they mean by it and by a national culture, they will be suspected
of merely using the term to cover an interest in special issues
by no means synonymous with it, however importantly they may be
related to it. But the part is not greater than the whole, and an
all-round statesman-like attitude is what is necessary, and should
be forthcoming from a Church that is truly Scottish and has the
deepest interests of Scotland at heart. Nor will these ministerial
protagonists gain anything by suggesting that “Scottish employers of
labour ought to do their utmost to retain their fellow-countrymen at
home.” The suggestion takes no cognizance of economic realities. Nor
is the suggested restriction of immigration any more feasible under
the existing system. It is impossible to discriminate against the
Irish in that way as long as we are co-members of the British Empire.
If anything is to be done it must be along the lines of re-acquiring
Scottish control of Scottish affairs, and more particularly such
a measure of financial autonomy as would enable projects like the
mid-Scotland ship canal, land settlement on a far greater scale, the
creation of co-operative agencies in our agriculture, afforestation
and so forth, to be developed in a way the House of Commons has not
allowed—in short, to undo the present neglect of, and contempt for,
Scottish affairs, and their treatment, where they have had any,
within the limits of alien and inappropriate conceptions, which are
largely responsible for the pass to which we have been brought, and
which cannot be undone until we have once again a Parliament of our
own and are free to move on the axis of our own mentality.
VII
“We should be the last to assert that there are no aspects of the
smaller nationalism worth conserving,” says another opponent; “there
are many, but the best of them are alive and effective in Scotland
to-day, and they have no necessary connection with the structure of
Government. But Scotland, without losing her sense of herself as a
Scottish nationality, has attained to a full and complete sense
of a larger nationality, and she is not going to throw off that
sense of partnership in larger nationality under the leadership of
archaic and thrown-back minds, all of them belonging to the largely
denationalized region of Clydeside.” Now the fact of the matter is
that no valuable aspect of “the smaller nationalism” is permitted to
function, except under extraordinary handicaps, by the conditions of
progressive Anglicization (in violation of even such safeguarding
clauses as the Treaty of Union contained), which have increasingly
dominated Scotland during the past hundred years. Scotland has
ceased to hold any distinctive place in the political or cultural
map of Europe. The centralization of book-publishing and journalism
in London—the London monopoly of the means of publicity—has reduced
Scottish arts and letters to shadows of their former or potential
selves, qualitatively beneath contempt in comparison with the
distinctive arts and letters of any other country in Europe.
There is no Scottish writer to-day of the slightest international
standing. Scotland connotes to the world “religious” bigotry, a
genius for materialism, “thrift,” and, on the social and cultural
side, Harry Lauderism and an exaggerated sentimental nationalism,
which is obviously a form of compensation for the lack of a
realistic nationalism. No race of men protest their love of country
so perfervidly as the Scots—no country in its actual conditions
justifies any such protestations less. Every recent reference book in
any department of human activity shows the position to which Scotland
has degenerated. “Europa, 1926” (although it is presumably designed
for British readers) lists contemporary Czech and Bulgarian poets,
litterateurs, musicians, etc. (the bare names—which convey nothing!)
but it excludes Scotland completely. Ireland, on the contrary, has a
section to itself, and a special article on the boundary question.
Professor Pittard’s “Race and History,” doing justice to every other
people under the sun, deals only very slightly and imperfectly with
Scotland, and fails to take account of any of the newer material,
_e.g._, the works of Tocher. Like examples can be multiplied in every
direction.
Again, letters from Paris, or “Our Irish Letter,” etc., are familiar
features of English newspapers. Whoever saw a “Scottish Letter”?
Concern with Scottish interests of any kind has been so completely
excluded from publicity, has been made so completely a case of
“beating the air,” that the usual headlines following a “Scottish
Night” at Westminster are “Absent Members—Empty Benches—During
Discussion on Scottish Estimates,” while from the report it appears
that the debate resolves itself into a potpourri of stale jokes.
Scotland alone of all European countries that have ever been in
anything like its position relatively to any other country, has
failed to develop a Nationalist Movement capable of affecting the
practical political situation in some measure or other. Why have
the Scottish members of all parties who have supported the numerous
successive Scottish Home Rule measures acquiesced so tamely in their
defeat at the hands of the English majority? There must be more in
this acquiescence than meets the eye. It represents an abrogation of
themselves, for all effective purposes, as the political leaders of
Scotland of which it is inconceivable that they should be guilty,
unless—behind the ostensible position—they were cognizant of a power
against which they were incapable of contending, a power so possessed
of the monopoly of mass publicity that it could completely stultify
them by its all-pervasive _suppressio veri, suggestio falsi_ the
instant they went beyond a given line.
Contrasting the pre-Union achievements and promise of Scottish arts
and letters with the beggarly results since, it is not too much to
assert that Scottish Nationality was sold for “a mess of pottage,”
and that Scotland has since been paying the price by submitting
to the diversion of her entire energies into purely materialistic
channels—not, however, as the present condition of Scotland and
Scottish industries shows, for its own benefit. For whose, then?
That I shall attempt to indicate. But, first of all, it cannot be
too strongly stressed that its social, commercial, and industrial
conditions to-day afford strong _prima facie_ evidence that if, as is
commonly contended, Scotland has owed a great deal materialistically
(whatever it may have lost in other directions) to its Union with
England, it has now wholly ceased to derive any such advantages; the
boot, indeed, is on the other foot; and on that, as on other grounds,
it is high time to reconsider the relationships between the two
countries.
What prevents the development of well-informed and positive policies
in regard to such problems as that of the Scottish Highlands?
Col. John Buchan, M.P., expressed the opinion in a letter to the
present writer that “it is impossible to make up one’s mind on the
Scottish Home Rule question—the necessary facts, and figures are
not available.” Why are they not available? In certain directions
these have been systematically refused by Government Departments—or
purposely embodied along with the English in such a way that
comparisons between the two countries cannot be instituted. In
other directions the refusal of financial facilitation, as Mr
William Graham, M.P., has pointed out, has resulted in the creation
of a tremendous leeway in the economic and social documentation
of Scotland, so that in practically every direction laborious
independent research is necessary to get at the facts and figures.
They are nowhere readily available.
The vested interests of the Scottish daily papers are all part
and parcel of the sequelæ of the Union. They all “make a show”
of Scottishness by dealing in windy and suitably contradictory
generalizations with Scottish topics—but they all toe the secret
line. Letters sent in by readers are carefully censored. Opinions
may be expressed (preferably anti-nationalist, or, better still,
merely sentimentally nationalist), but facts and figures are not
permitted—or, at all events, only isolated ones. Nothing can get
published that attempts to relate facts and figures in regard to
Scottish subjects to each other, and thus, to a national policy of
any kind. There is not a single paper that dare publish a series of
articles dealing thoroughly and systematically either with the case
for Scottish Home Rule or with any of the major social or economic
problems of Scotland. Nor dare they relax their vigilance in respect
of the utterance of Scottish M.P.s in Parliament. Only so much is
allowed “through”; the rest must be kept back in the sieve. What
does appear must appear so fragmentarily and disjointedly—and be
so offset by the facetiousness and belittlement of leaders and
tittle-tattle paragraphs—that it cannot conduce to the creation of
any “well-informed and positive policy.” What hidden interests behind
the newspapers dictate this corruption of their natural functions
and insist upon a journalism to bamboozle rather than educate the
public—a journalism to make “confusion worse confounded” rather than
to clarify national issues in a systematic and rational fashion?
What is the meaning of the whole position and policy that is,
superficially, so determinedly unintelligible?
It is utterly irrational to find all the real practical issues of a
nation “outwith the sphere of practical politics” and that sphere
monopolized by professional-politician issues, few of which have
the most indirect bearing upon national realities. It is utterly
irrational to find a whole electorate bemused and misled (for all
practical purposes) by such an abracadabra. That is the position of
Scotland to-day. All the Scottish papers aver that the demand for
Scottish nationalism is made by “a handful of fanatics,” and has
no real weight of “public opinion” behind it—but what is “public
opinion,” and how far is it reflected by a Press which, in a country
which has always been overwhelmingly radical and republican, and
where to-day a third of the entire electorate vote Socialist, is
solidly sycophantic and anti-socialist? _The Glasgow Herald_, in a
recent leader, observed that there was no need for street-corner
oratory in these days of a great free Press whose columns are open
for the expression of all manner of opinion, and its editor, Sir
Robert Bruce, is frequently to be heard dilating on the high status
and professional integrity of the journalist to-day. Yet it is simple
fact that there is no free Press and that journalists hold their
jobs by opportunism and cannot afford to “own their own souls.”
A man with “ideas of his own” is of no use in a modern newspaper
office. The vigilance of the Press censorship—the ubiquitous range
and insidiousness of the policy behind it—is such that even _The
Glasgow Herald_ does not, and cannot, permit signed correspondence
on such subjects as Scottish music or drama, for example (let alone
politics), if these go against the ideas of the vested interests
concerned with these departments, not to speak of the veiled
interests behind these vested interests which “hold all the strings
in their hands.” Interplay of opinion is confined to opposing views
within a certain range; but the essence of the matter all the time,
so far as the ultimate interests are concerned, is “Heads I win,
tails you lose.” It is this that makes a goblin of the vaunted
Scottish hard-headedness and practicality—induces the amazing
supineness of the successful protagonists of Scottish Devolution
Measures when these are rejected by the English majority at
Westminster—prevents any real Scottish issue emerging into the realm
of “practical politics”—makes the systematic neglect of Scottish
interests of all kinds a subject for stereotyped jokes in the
Scottish Press (professedly favourable to “legitimate” nationalist
aspirations—in China)—prevents different sections of the Scottish
public realizing that their diverse grievances and difficulties
spring from a common centre and denies them those publicist services
which would effectively relate consequence to cause—and foists,
not least upon Scotsmen themselves, that stock conception of the
“canny Scot,” which is so belied by the actualities of our national
position that it can only be accounted for by saying that if, as M.
Delaisi argues, government is impossible unless a myth of some kind
is foisted upon the “people,” then, so far as Scotland is concerned,
its present disastrous condition is due to the fact that the existing
myth is out of touch with realities to a degree so abnormal that
history presents no parallel to it.
Discussing the possibilities of a Scottish Renaissance I have written
elsewhere that the Credit Reform proposals of Major C. H. Douglas
will be “discerned in retrospect as having been one of the great
contributions of re-oriented Scottish genius to world-affairs,” and
that I wished to record my unqualified pride and joy in the fact
that of all people in the world a Scotsman—one of the race that has
been (and remains) most hag-ridden by commercial Calvinism, with its
hideous doctrine of ‘the need to work,’ ‘the necessity of drudgery,’
and its devices of ‘thrift,’ and the whole tortuous paraphernalia
of modern capitalism—should have absolutely ‘got to the bottom of
economics,’ and shown the way to the Workless State.
It is significant that practically the only, and certainly the only
real (if, unfortunately, only very partial and temporary) political
triumph Scotland has scored over England since the Union of the
Parliaments took place just over 100 years ago: and was associated
with the name of a great Scotsman and with precisely the type of
business which it has since become almost physically impossible to
think—let alone speak—about. The Banking System! I refer to Sir
Walter Scott’s _Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_. Just how much Scott
(albeit a Tory of Tories, and a national liability rather than an
asset in most respects), was roused by the Government’s proposal
that Scottish Banks should cease to issue notes “in order to unify
paper currency throughout the United Kingdom,” can be gauged from his
veiled threat that “claymores have edges.” Scott’s agitation was so
far successful that the Government dropped their proposals inasmuch
as they related to the Scotch pound notes—for the time being.
“Very probably,” says a recent writer, “they realized that there
was real determination behind Scott’s reference to claymores—even
if it did not actually mean the wielding of these lethal weapons to
enforce the protest.” All who are in earnest about Scottish Home
Rule should take a note of that. Evidences of “real determination”
must be forthcoming if anything is to be achieved. The Parliamentary
record of the Scottish Home Rule question would long ago have driven
protagonists of any mental and moral calibre to the realization that
an irresistible premium had been put upon the recourse to militant
methods, and that anything else is a waste of time—“an expenditure of
spirit in a waste of shame.”
But a great deal has happened since 1826. The existence of a Scotsman
of Sir Walter’s calibre was a nasty snag for the Government of the
day—but the policy behind them could afford to wait, to pretend to
yield; it is not every generation, happily, that throws up such a
figure to thwart its purposes, although Lord Rosebery _did_ concede
that Scotland is “the milch cow of the Empire.” There has appeared no
Scotsman since of equal size to do anything analogous and to expose
the tremendous losses to Scotland through the financial unification
of Scotland with England that has since been consummated. The dangers
that Scott apprehended and warded off a hundred years ago are fully
battening on Scottish interests to-day, and they are powerless to
defend themselves. How powerless is indicated by the fact that the
Scottish Press (whose columns are shut to all discussion of national
realities) gives prominence to such ridiculous statements as that of
Mr Ridge Beedle, prospective Unionist candidate for the Camlachie
Division of Glasgow, who says that “it is owing to the Scottish Home
Rule Movement that new industries are not settling in Scotland;
industrialists are preferring locations in England where continuity
and settled conditions are assured.” Thousands upon thousands of
Scottish electors are so hopelessly bemused that they swallow an
absurdity like that as if it were a self-evident truth. If it were,
the difficulties of Scottish Nationalism would be over. Our English
competitors would be falling over each other to subsidize it and
ensure its success.
VIII
Here the connection between the diverse movements in Scotland I
indicated as so superficially incompatible becomes clear. The Credit
Reform Movement is essentially one for the removal of all the false
restraints under which humanity is labouring. It is not without
significance that its leader, Major Douglas, should belong to the
race which has suffered most abominably from the forms under which it
has been subjected to two of the greatest agencies—the Reformation
and the Industrial Revolution—which the impelling force, which has
multiplied these restrains until “civilization” is tending to reduce
the majority of mankind to the condition of robots, has utilized
in securing that stranglehold on life which it is now visibly
exercising. Will Scotland yet produce
“Eighth marvel of seven on earth,
A Douglas at peace?”