THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most romantic.  I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known; that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one.  I know it is always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; that they have an eye to business.  I like that phrase “an eye” to business.

Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his forehead.  It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry:  the two duties of counting sheep and of eating men.  But when that one eye was put out he was done for.  But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though their best friends must admit that they are occasionally business-like.  They are, quite fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and this is proved by the very economic argument that is used to prove their harshness and hunger for the material.  The mass of Scots have accepted the industrial civilisation, with its factory chimneys and its famine prices, with its steam and smoke and steel—­and strikes.  The mass of the Irish have not accepted it.  The mass of the Irish have clung to agriculture with claws of iron; and have succeeded in keeping it.  That is because the Irish, though far inferior to the Scotch in art and literature, are hugely superior to them in practical politics.  You do need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilisation.  It does really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think that Glasgow is a grand place.  Yet the miracle is achieved; and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion.  I have never had the faintest illusion about Leeds or Birmingham.  The industrial dream suited the Scots.  Here was a really romantic vista, suited to a romantic people; a vision of higher and higher chimneys taking hold upon the heavens, of fiercer and fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate like dew.  Here were taller and taller engines that began already to shriek and gesticulate like giants.  Here were thunderbolts of communication which already flashed to and fro like thoughts.  It was unreasonable to expect the rapt, dreamy, romantic Scot to stand still in such a whirl of wizardry to ask whether he, the ordinary Scot, would be any the richer.

He, the ordinary Scot, is very much the poorer.  Glasgow is not a rich city.  It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly rich men.  It is not, perhaps, quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London, Manchester, Birmingham, or Bolton.  It is vastly poorer than Rome, Rouen, Munich, or Cologne.  A certain civic vitality notable in Glasgow may, perhaps, be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scots has there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independence of the Irish.