A COUNTRY IN WANT OF A GRIEVANCE

The Times
December 4th, 1856
Page 6.

Scotland is a country manifestly in want of a grievance. She labours under the weariness of attained wishes and the curse of granted prayers. Never was a territory north of latitude 55 degrees so favoured before. Good fortune has joined her inseparably to the richest and most enterprising nation of modern times. Instead of little peddling Darien schemes, she can take a part in the largest commerce of the globe. Instead of building herring and haddock smacks, she constructs steamers for half the British empire. Oatmeal is changed into good wheaten bread, mud and thatch into bricks, mortar and slate. Scotchmen not only have their own country to themselves, but they have as much of England and Ireland and the colonies and India as they have the wit to take, and for a century and a half their share has been a large one. But nothing will suffice them but to believe that they are ill-treated or in danger from some cause or another. Sometimes it is we English that are at fault: our atrocious usurpations with respect to the unicorn’s crown and the quartering of the red lion are enough to make the “bluid” of Scotia boil; sometimes it is the Scotch themselves who perversely adapt themselves to Southron usages when they come abroad, and abandon the glorious traditions of Scottish superiority as completely as the “hamely parritch” on which their sturdy limbs were nourished in infancy. All appear to agree that their nationality is threatened, and that something extraordinary must be done to preserve it. For the last five or six years the danger has been every day more imminent; the Society for the Preservation of Scottish Rights was patriotic, but its heraldic restorations did not go to the root of the evil; nothing now is left but a universal effort on the part of Scotland. We have to announce the great result the birth which is to follow all this travail of Scottish indignation. A monument to Wallace is to be forthwith erected on the Abbey Craig, near Stirling, “overlooking the field where, five and a half centuries since, he routed the invading English army, and established the liberties and independence of Scotland”. Tremble, Englishmen! blush, recreant Scots, who send your sons to Oxford and Cambridge, and coquet with prelacy! The nationality of Scotland is about to be at last saved from the encroachments of “in many respects an inferior nation”.
If a Southron fancy that while Scotchmen have every avenue to eminence open to them south of the Tweed they are a little too jealous and exclusive at home, let him think of the Abbey Craig and acquiesce in Northern superiority. If a Scotchman who has been 30 years in England ceases to lecture us on the pre-eminence, historical and cultural, of his race, - if he goes to our church and sends his sons to our schools, - let him visit the new bronze Wallace, in the highest style of Scotch art, and the sight will make him a perfect porcupine of patriotism for the rest of his days. Such, at least, is the principle on which the monument is advocated by Professor Blackie before a great many Provosts, Sheriffs, and other local notabilities, at a meeting in Edinburgh.
Now, for a man of peace to come forward and support a scheme for commemorating an English defeat purely on the grounds that it would develop patriotic feelings requires some explanation in the present day. We all know what would be said in case of a similar proposition in England. Suppose a national subscription in London to celebrate the triumph of Queen Philippa or the Earl of Surrey over Scotsmen – what a howl of indignation we should have! We should never hear the end of dissertations on the essential unity of mankind, the folly of national distinctions, the wickedness of appealing to ancient animosities. Yet, these very same Scotchmen, with nothing to complain of, and for the mere want of something to meet and talk about, cheer a proposal to erect a monument on the spot where an English army was “routed” five centuries ago. The exquisite analogies by which the speaker supported his defence of nationality were worthy of the means by which it is hoped to nourish it. Scotchmen should keep themselves apart from Englishmen, because trees and the lower animals have been created in different forms. It is the will of God that there shall be deerhounds, mastiffs and Skye terriers, so it is right that there should be Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen. As it is not right that either of these kinds should be absorbed in the general idea of a dog, or by any special kind of dog, so Scotchmen and Irishmen should not lose their nationality in the general idea of man or Englishman. Unhappily, analogy is a dangerous logical weapon, which, like the missile of the Australian savage, often returns, and wounds him that uses it. When we see Englishmen and Scotchmen like the mastiff and the terrier, in form, size, nature, and capabilities, unable to follow the same pursuits or to learn the same habits, we shall accept the argument that the Creator intended to set an eternal barrier between them. The sophistry which would compare mere historical or political distinctions between men to differences placed by the hand of nature between the several species of a genus of animals must be apparent to the speaker when he reads over the words which the fervour of patriotism led him to pronounce. However, as far as applause and subscriptions afford a test, the Professor’s reasoning has prevailed, and the Scottish nationality is to be duly vindicated.
Now, as one speaker observed, a monument to Wallace is a little thing, nor are the follies of the Scottish Rights Association matters of importance. We must, however, take the liberty of informing Scotchmen what all this restless self-glorification seems to us to portend. There is a widespread feeling that Scotland has not within the present generation quite upheld her own past reputation. Edinburgh, indeed, continues to affect literary airs, and a coterie of writers live together on terms of mutual admiration. Numbers of young Scotchmen, as of yore, come south, and reap the reward of energy and ability; but, on the whole, Scotland has lost way. She remains motionless, relying on past achievements, boasting of great men that are dead and gone, repeating maxims which were discoveries once, but are mere platitudes now, and showing few signs of intellectual or moral vigour. Past generations gave the country good primary schools, and the present has added nothing. The Universities are inferior, the schools for the middle and higher classes are inferior, professional education and professional spirit are not what they are in England. The clergy are comparatively an unlettered class of men. Hardly a single idea on political or social subjects comes in the present day from Scotland. Literature is merely a faint and worthless imitation of old models. Poems in the style of Burns, which can be written by any human being who can write at all, are actually still produced in incredible quantities. The old metaphysics, the old divinity, are quite worn out with the discussion of cliques, who cannot get beyond them. Scotchmen, in fact, seem to do nothing but masquerade in the garments of their grandfathers.
Now, it seems to us that this general poverty of thought is the cause why Scotch Lords and professors and men of letters are continually harping on their nationality and their historical renown. When there really was a national mind the world heard nothing about the Abbey Craig, the Royal arms, and the rights of the Scottish heralds. Now, by their exclusiveness, and what we will make bold to call their provincialism, the Scotch have not only kept out English influences which might have done them good, but they have driven the best of their countrymen to England. There can be no doubt that we get nearly all the talent that the northern kingdom produces, and the cause is not difficult to ascertain. It is not merely because Parliament sits in London that England draws away the best brains from the other two kingdoms, but because Englishmen have thrown away those confined notions of nationality which still prevail in Scotland and Ireland. We south of the Tweed have risen to the conception of a United Kingdom; nay, more, of a British Empire, and every subject of the Queen finds here a career in which he may advance without fear of jealousy or prejudice. But in Edinburgh the cry, or at least the feeling, still is, Scotland for the Scotch. Yet, the more Scotland has striven to be a nation, the more she has sunk to be a province; and now, so far from taking offence at being compared to Lancashire, she would do well to be careful that Lancashire does not become in all respects a more important part of the world that herself. We will conclude by offering a few words of advice to Professor Blackie and his countrymen. Let them be assured that mere self-assertion has little effect in the present day, and that they will do better to reform what is amiss among them than to utter empty glorifications of themselves or sneers against their neighbours. If the Professor has the reform of education at heart, her will certainly not further it by encouraging his countrymen to believe that the English are an inferior people, that in our Universities there is very little knowledge of Greek, that our church is a semi-Popish mummery, and that, “with all the appliances of cram and examination and rewards in mere money”, Oxford and Cambridge cannot produce as much intellectual vigour as the Scotch Universities. To any one acquainted with the two countries, these statements will, of course, appear simply ridiculous, yet that they can be received with approbation by a Scotch audience is evident, and proves how far our neighbours are from that diffidence of their own merits which is essential to real improvement. Let Scotchmen try to fit their society and their educational institutions to the requirements of the age, and that will erect a more enduring monument to their country’s honour than any that can be raised of bronze or granite.