It is strange, and yet not strange, that the flowering of Scotland's genius began in the dark period that followed the Union of Parliaments, and it is nothing less than a tragedy that, like that of Ireland's, its rich harvest was reaped by another country. [The phenomenon of the practical genius that grew out of the impoverished soil of Ireland, and which flowered in the United States, has scarcely been noticed by Irish historians, yet it is a fact that illiterate Irish emigrants and their descendants became the most aggressive racial group in the republic, displaying boundless genius in business and practical politics.] The Union left Scotland in an economic and political coma. The protracted scheming and chicanery that culminated in the signing of the Treaty seemed, for a while, to drain the country of its national elan and initiative. It was as if the people had been sapped of their vigour by a process of political osmosis. The ancient trade with France dwindled, no new trade took its place, and the whole country lapsed into a condition of almost hopeless poverty. It was one of the most dismal periods in the history of Scotland.

A succession of historians have attempted to show that Scotland gained, ultimately, from the Union, but they merely credit the political coup with the natural and inevitable advancement of the country during one of the most progressive centuries that the world has ever seen. It could be proven that Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Madagascar have shown great progress in the same period—probably more progress, relatively, than Scotland. To arrive at an intelligent estimate of the benefits of Parliamentary Union accruing to Scotland, one must make use of comparisons, and if we compare Scotland's progress in the past two centuries with that of England, we must inevitably conclude that the northern partner did not gain materially from the alliance. To retort that England's progress has been Scotland's progress—the two countries being one—is merely to avoid the vital question. We must consider what Scotland could have accomplished for herself had she remained out of the alliance. That is a question that no man can answer confidently, but this much is certain: had she retained on her own soil even a substantial portion of the practical genius which she exported in an ever-widening stream to England, she must, inevitably, have become a dominant country in the world's affairs, instead of a land of pretty sentiments and stirring traditions, with one-sixth of her area entirely depopulated and given over to tourists and kilted deer-stalkers from London, Echoes of the hereditary incompatability of the two races were heard on both sides of the border for many a day to come. The Act of Settlement had declared the House of Hanover to be heirs to the throne, but, nevertheless, the last few months of Anne's reign were clouded with apprehension. The sinister shadow of Bolingbroke lay across England, and, marplot that he was, he was soon plotting with the Jacobites on behalf of the Pretender. Anne died, upsetting his schemes, and George I, with an accent more raucous and less intelligible than that of King James, assumed the throne.

The rumblings of war were still heard north of the Cheviot Hills. The Earl of Mar assembled the Highland chiefs, occupied Perth, and looked threateningly towards the south, but all he did was to prove that he was better fitted for deer-stalking than leading an army. A more miserable braggart never stood at the head of a Scottish army. Some of his ragged rebels went south, joined others raised on the border, and an undisciplined mob of three thousand invaded England. They got as far as Preston before they were checkmated by the King's forces.

The contemptible Mar, with ten thousand men at his back, moved against Argyll, who had less than three thousand men to fall back on. Even so, Mar was beaten at Sheriffmuir, and in that defeat of 1715 the cause of the Jacobites was lost. It was at that black moment that James Edward, the Pretender, reached the land of his fathers. It did not take him long to see that he had no leaders in Scotland, and he returned to France. Mar deserted his army to follow the royal exile, but it was just as well that he took that craven course out of a difficulty far beyond his courage and talents, for if he had not deserted his army it would have deserted him. Thus ended the fiasco of "The Fifteen". The rebellion was just one more example of the incompetence and shabby self-interest of the Scottish noblemen of the period.

Thirty years passed away. Marshal Wade quietened the Highlands, scattering the remaining rebels and building forts and roads. The Hanoverian kings consolidated themselves. Sir Robert Walpole gave the country years of peaceful and intelligent rule. The Union still rankled in the minds of the common people of Scotland, but its somewhat obscure blessings were extolled by the upper classes— largely because Walpole, with a shrewd knowledge of the people he was dealing with, conferred the chief offices in Scotland on Scotsmen.

Britain and France were at peace, so the Old Pretender was muzzled. But in 1739 Britain was at war with both France and Spain, and, seizing his opportunity, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, made his romantic bid to re-establish the house of Stuart in its ancient stronghold. The clans rallied. With a handful of Camerons the Prince took Edinburgh, then smashed Sir John Cope's army at Prestonpans. It looked as if the Stuarts were coming back again, but the Prince made the mistake of trying to keep a Highland army intact during an invasion of England. He did take Carlisle, and he did get as far south as Derby, but he had timid officers with him, and on their advice turned back towards Scotland. The little force of five thousand men was gradually manoeuvred between the pincers of the Duke of Cumberland's army and that of Marshal Wade. The Highlanders retreated, and beat off an attack of Cumberland's Horse at Clifton, near Penrith. It was the last fight to take place on English soil—the last struggle between England and Scotland. Then came Culloden Moor, the final rout, and the attempt of the Government to exterminate the Gaelic civilization. For the Highlander, it was "Lochaber No More" and the road to far, cold places; [In Scotland to-day there is a strange reluctance to face the historical realities of the Highlands. The sentimental wellsprings of every Scottish child are primed by endless references to the Massacre of Glencoe, but few of them are told that the notorious Highland Clearances that followed the '45 Rebellion drove whole parishes of worthy people out of the country for ever. Within a decade 15,000 crofters were driven out of Sutherland alone, to make way for sheep!] for the Lowlander, the road of destiny was the dusty highway leading to the south.

Pioneers of the second peaceful invasion of England by Scots were already impressing their personalities upon London. One of them was Alexander Cruden, sometimes called "Alexander the Corrector". This quaint character was a product of Aberdeen, where he was born in 1700, and while he was not interred in Westminster Abbey, nor remembered by historians, he comes into this record because his career illustrates the ease with which Scotsmen got ahead of Englishmen at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Alexander studied for the Church in Aberdeen, but became so irrational, even for an Aberdeen divinity student, that he had to be placed in a lunatic asylum. Immediately upon his release he headed for London, on the advice of well-meaning friends who assumed, naively, that even a demented Aberdonian could compete with the Sassenachs. The assumption was correct, for Alexander became tutor to the sons of a titled gentleman of Hertfordshire, and when he had filled the heads of his pupils with knowledge he moved into London, where William Ged, the Edinburgh Scot who invented stereotype printing, was rapidly going bankrupt printing Bibles and Prayer Books for Cambridge University, and established himself as a bookseller. He was in one of his dark moods at this time, which entitles him to the dubious distinction of being the first definitely insane man—• though certainly not the last—who took up book-selling in London. Even with his handicap he became so successful in the literary world that he was appointed bookseller to the Queen.

Having found the selling of books so easy, he made the mistake of tackling the infinitely more difficult business of writing them, and lost his fortune and his reason at one fell swoop. The fell swoop was his Concordance of the Bible. Following another period in a lunatic asylum, this poor soul began to write pamphlets—a sure sign that his mind had dissolved completely. He had to be locked up again until he became manageable. Free to walk around again, he began to call himself "Alexander the Corrector", and went about exhorting people to keep the Sabbath Day holy. Then he conceived the idea of getting a title, but the only politician who did not dodge him was the Earl of Paulet, who had gouty feet! Failing to get a title, where so many imbeciles had succeeded, Alexander ran for Parliament for the City of London in 1754, and almost succeeded in winning a seat in the House of Commons. He had a wide following in London, of rich and poor alike, and was regarded as a philosopher. He died, after damning John Wilkes in a pamphlet, and one cannot help but ask the question : If a demented Scot could do so much in London, what could sane Scots not do?

They were doing a good deal. David Hume had come down from Edinburgh in 1738, at the age of twenty-seven, with the manuscript of his monumental Treatise on Human Nature in his pack, and when his philosophical thesis got into print Great Britain heard, for the first time, a counterblast to the warped and warping orthodoxy of religious fanatics like Knox and Laud. Hume's great book sounded the battle-cry of free-thinking in Great Britain. It was a great and courageous adventure into the unknown realms of spiritual emancipation, and, as might have been expected, it immediately plunged its young author into the tempestuous waters of ill-natured criticism. Here was heresy !

The brilliant young Scot survived the storm of abuse, although it troubled him.

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed in my philosophy [he wrote], and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who, not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth, but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me in order to make a company apart, but no one will harken to me. Everyone keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm which beats upon me from every side. I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians, and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declared my disapprobation of their systems, and can I be surprised if they should express a hatred of mine, and of my person?

David Hume reasoned fearlessly and wrote with a refreshing clarity. In addition to opening up new vistas of philosophical conjecture for Englishmen, and making a wide and permanent breach in the dark wall which successive religious bigots had built around the minds of the people, this pioneer in the realm of human philosophy found time to write the first comprehensive and scholarly history of England which that country had seen—a work so well executed that it was accepted as a standard work long after its author's death.

Another Scot of this period who laid rare gifts at the feet of the English was James Thomson. Born at Ednam, in Roxburghshire, in 1700, Thomson was educated at Edinburgh University for the ministry, but he was so eloquent and persuasive that he was advised to go to London. He took the advice, and in the year 1725 arrived in the metropolis, with a manuscript entitled Winter among his scanty belongings. That manuscript, an important contribution to English literature, was published in 1726. Its young author, like the majority of the literary figures of his day, dedicated his efforts to men of wealth. Winter was laid at the feet of Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker of the House of Commons. The great man acknowledged the honour by sending Thomson twenty guineas! It was with a profound feeling of relief that we discovered that Sir Spencer was not a Scot!

Struggling in poverty, Thomson put out, in succession, Summer, Spring, and Autumn, but the quartette of literary achievements brought him small reward, for in the spring of 1738 he was arrested for a debt of seventy pounds. Still, this harassed Scot had something to bequeath to England. Before me, as I write these words, lies a curious and very rare little book bearing the following title :

ALFRED—A MASQUE

REPRESENTED BEFORE
THEIR ROYAL HIGHNESSES
THE
PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES AT CLIFDEN
ON THE FIRST OF AUG. 1740

Let us turn the frail and yellowed pages of this masque by James Thomson and David Mallet. Ah, here it is ! An ode. It is worth reproducing, just as it was spoken for the first time on that night of August nearly two hundred years ago.

I.

When Britain firft, at heaven's command,
Arofe from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels fung this ftrain:
Rule Britannia, rule the waves,
Britons never will be flaves.

II.

The nations not fo bleft as thee
Muft, in their turn, to tyrants fall,
While thou/halt flourifh, great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
Rule, etc.

III.

Still more majestic/halt thou rife,
More dreadful, from each foreign ftroke:
As the loud blaft that tears the fkies
Serves but to root thy native oak.
Rule, etc.

Thee haughty tyrants ne'er/hall tame;
All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but aroufe thy generous flame,
But work their woe, and thy renown.
Rule, etc.

V.

To thee belongs the rural reign,
Thy cities fhall with commerce fhine;
All thine fhall be the fubject main,
And every fhore it circles thine.
Rule, etc.

The Mufes, ftill with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coaft repair:
Bleft ifle! with matchless beauty crown'd,
And many hearts to guard the fair.
Rule Britannia, rule the waves,
Britons never will be flaves.

Thomson's "Bleft ifle" left a good deal to be desired, especially for the "Mufes", and his grandiose predictions about England's invulnerability were knocked somewhat askew soon afterwards by the American Revolutionary War, but the fact remains that Arbuthnot's John Bull had been presented with a song of the sea that was to become the perennial battle-hymn of Great Britain's proud sea-dogs—-Rule Britannia!

The spirit of the proud sea-hymn written by the Scot was in curious contrast to that of another national paean of praise sung for the first time at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, five years later, where, the Daily Advertiser tells us, "the universal applause it met with, being encored with repeated huzzas, sufficiently denotes in how just an abhorrence they hold the arbitrary Schemes of our insidious Enemies, and detest the despotick Attempts of Papal power". The title of this anthem was "God save the King", and there was evidence to indicate that the old Scottish song had been tampered with, for the fourth verse, which made the theatre resound with excited huzzas, ran thus :

Lord grant that Marshall Wade,
May by Thy mighty aid,
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush,
God save the King.

[Englishmen have gone to a great deal of trouble in efforts to prove that the National Anthem was composed by one or more of their countrymen. Their evidence is not very convincing. On the other hand, the words of "God Save the King" were found cut into the glass of an old drinking-cup preserved at Fingask Castle, in the Carse of Gowrie, and part of the air they are set to was found in a collection of Scottish music published in the reign of William and Mary.]

While Thomson was composing his famous ode to the glory of England, another Scot of a very different type was playing the part of a lotus-eater in London, all unconscious of the high destiny that awaited him. This was John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute. He was born in Edinburgh on 25th May, 1713, received the customary education deemed suitable for the sons of Scottish noblemen, and then proceeded to drift around aimlessly in the social backwaters of his class. A political mediocrity, veneered in English schools and English society, Bute might never have got beyond the ante-room of some friendly minister's office but for the same sort of fortuitous accident that changed John Arbuthnot's career.

It happened in 1747, when Bute was attending a race-meeting in England. The weather was unsettled. Just as the horses appeared the rain began to fall in torrents, on lords and commoners alike. It fell on Frederick, Prince of Wales, and His Royal Highness, not in the best of humour, took refuge in a tent. The rain continued. The Prince fumed. Time grew heavy on his hands. An obsequious flunkey suggested cards. The Prince was pleased to play— but with whom? There was a bit of a flurry as the flunkey cast about for a suitable partner for the royal gamester. Several gentlemen of breeding were available, but they were loud, horsy fellows, quite unfit to sit across the table from a polished gentleman like Prince Frederick.

Suddenly the suave and immaculate Lord Bute appeared on the scene. The flunkey's problem was solved. The Scottish flaneur was brought to the Prince's table. He played cards well—and not too well! His manners were easy and engaging. His conversation was intelligent, and ranged over a wide variety of subjects. The Prince was impressed.

All might have ended happily in the tent, but the Prince made the same mistake that many another married man has made—he invited the handsome and debonair bachelor to his house. Bute played his cards as skilfully at Leicester House as he played them in the tent at the racecourse. In 1750 he had sufficiently ingratiated himself in the Royal Household to be appointed one of the Lords of the Bedchamber to Frederick, Prince of Wales. It would appear that he performed his duties with more than perfunctory skill, for he became the lover of the Princess. The illicit liaison was the scandal of London and the secret joke of Leicester House, and it added to the bons mots of the period the artificial and suspiciously dubious one about the Princess and the Duchess of Kingston, who was one of her maids of honour. The easy virtues of another maid of honour were under discussion, and the story goes that the Princess inquired into "les raisons de cette conduite." "Ah, Madame", replied the Duchess, with feminine malice, "chacun a son but/"

Bute, with the cynical and stupid arrogance of his type, was quite incapable of meeting the situation. His mode of living did not change. His contempt for the common people became more and more evident. He still hid behind royal robes—perhaps behind royal bed-curtains! As the political dictator of the moment, he made new enemies by clearing out the Whigs in wholesale fashion, and replacing them with Scotsmen of very mediocre talents. His system of patronage was odious, even if we bear in mind the balancing fact that his loudest and bitterest critics were disappointed English politicians. On one memorable occasion he filled a list of sixteen important offices with eleven Stuarts and four Mackenzies! Under his ministry, an office was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and this office of transparent bribery—it was established to win support for his Continental policy—spent twenty-five thousand pounds in one day. The fact has been deplored with due horror by Bute's detractors; the opposing fact, that there were plenty of Englishmen in the House of Commons willing to accept the bribes, is conveniently overlooked. Bute, at least, had a patriotic motive in distributing the money ; those who accepted it could not offer so plausible an excuse for their veniality.

The roar from the English public became a scream. Scurrilious demagogues like John Wilkes and Charles Churchill poured abuse upon the Prime Minister. Nicknames like "John Thistle" and "The Scotch Thane" were hurled at him by stump speakers and hired pamphleteers. He was attended by a bodyguard of ruffians when he appeared in the streets, and even after taking that precaution against mob violence he was attacked by Whig hooligans. Jackboots and petticoats were burned publicly near his residence--a broad hint that the public were aware of his amours with the Princess Dowager. Dire anonymous threats reached him through the mail.

He had apobates on his creaking political chariot. The Scots of London, stung by the racial nature of the attacks made upon him, hit back at the maligners. Tobias Smollett, the Scottish novelist and historian, had established a newspaper called The Briton—it made its appearance on the very day that Bute became Prime Minister, which leaves in one's mind the suspicion that it was a subsidized political organ— and when the storm broke he filled its pages with articles that were calculated to enhance Bute's reputation and tone down the malignancy of the criticism which was being voiced against his character, his administration, and the character of the Scottish race.

It was a praiseworthy effort, but it failed to stem the rising tide of the Englishmen's wrath. It had not been published a week when John Wilkes established another political organ, to which he gave the satirical name of The North Briton. This villainous sheet was devoted to bitter denunciations of Bute and the Scottish race. [The Scots had become so unpopular that when Lord Hertford, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, suggested taking David Hume to Dublin as his secretary, there was such a roar of ill-natured protest on racial grounds that Hertford had to drop the idea.] The London public hailed it with delight. Indeed, it flourished so well that within nine months poor Smollett had to admit that the game was up. He published the last copies of The Briton in February of 1763, leaving Wilkes free to damn the Scots to his heart's content, while he went abroad himself to damn the Pantheon. All in all, it was a damnable period.

Despite all this hysteria of hatred and condemnation, Lord Bute's political record has points where a defence of him may be honestly undertaken. He assumed office at one of those periods which invariably spell disaster and obloquy for the ablest ministry—the unsettled and querulous period of convalescence that followed the costly excitement of protracted war. He was confronted by the open sores left in the body politic by the masterful and pugnacious Pitt, and in the words of Samuel Butler, he believed that

A skillful leech is better far
Than half a hundred men of war.

He stood out stubbornly for peace and retrenchment—never popular policies while the reverberations of war still echo throughout the land—and, paying scant attention to the warmongers, kept England out of further trouble by negotiating the Peace of Paris. Although the policy was obviously a sound one for a country exhausted by a long succession of wars, its successful culmination only incensed the English jingoes. A cyclone of vilification swept towards the hapless Prime Minister, and when it passed on he was finished. His Ministry had been demolished by the whirlwind. His own unpopularity was so intense, and so fixed, that he had to beat a retreat.

Such was the outcome of what Englishmen were pleased to call "Bute's shameful peace", but when the country blundered into war again, which it did in the same year that Thomas Campbell, the Scottish author of "Ye Mariners of England" [Thomas Campbell, author of "Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden", "Lord Ullin's Daughter", and other poems of enduring merit, was born in Glasgow on 27th July, 1777. He moved to London as a young man, and on his death in 1844 his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey.] was born, many of the best minds in England had good reason to regret that a peacemaker like Bute was not at the War Office, for in that quarrel that began three short years after he retired Great Britain was soundly beaten on land by George Washington, saw, for the first and only time, English men-of-war beaten off the English coast in fair fighting by a Scotsman, [John Paul Jones, of Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, who fought for the American Colonies and founded the United States Navy, raided the coast of Great Britain repeatedly during the American War of Independence. He was the hero of the most spectacular sea-duel ever fought, when his man-of-war, the Bon Homme Richard, captured the British man-of-war, the Serapis, off Flamborough Head. In that terrific fight the victorious ship sank, but the Scots sea-wolf boarded the Serapis and took her to France.] and at the end of it all lost the richest colonies she ever possessed.

Lord Bute's eclipse was brought about almost entirely by the literary piranha who infested London. Yet, ironically enough, Bute, as we have already noted, was the first Prime Minister of Great Britain who had displayed a genuinely sympathetic interest in men of letters. Samuel Johnson had some harsh things to say about him and his administration, but it was Bute who granted the needy old lexicographer a pension of three hundred pounds a year, thus rescuing England's most illustrious literary figure from the quagmires of poverty. Moreover, Bute did not attach any political strings to his munificence. "It is not for anything that you may do," he told Johnson, not once but several times, "but for what you have done." That was not the language of a dissembler, and indeed the spirit of the bargain was never changed by any subsequent action of the Scottish Prime Minister.

His machinations at Court, and his mesalliance with the Princess Dowager, deserved emphatic condemnation, but the treatment he received from the English public was no less deserving of the scorn of fair-minded people. His political achievements were not in any way brilliant, as we have already noted, but the jaded period in which he served England as Prime Minister offered few opportunities for dramatic political achievements. It was his misfortune that he rode the subsiding but still angry waves after the storm, and the hero of the storm, had passed on. Only a miracle can save such statesmen from the stigma of mediocrity, and there was no miracle in the case of Bute.

He had cut a wide swath in the matter of political patronage, but apart from that questionable use of his office he kept his political skirts clean. Indeed, literary blunderbusses like Wilkes, who could be depended upon not to be too squeamish about their methods of assassination by slander, were at a loss to find the sort of evidence of ministerial perfidy that would further inflame the minds of the demagogues they led. Here Bute became the victim of monstrous injustice, for failing to find the evidence they sought, his critics changed their tactics and directed their venom against the Scottish race in general. Bute became the target of this race hatred. He could not, like Pitt, stand up and scornfully denounce the rabble who were vilifying the Scottish race, largely through his personality and political record. He chose to withdraw from public life.

He passed into a lonely retirement on the brink of the cliffs at Christchurch, Hampshire. He remained a political pariah, and nursed any sense of injury he may have felt for many a year, for he lived to the ripe age of seventy-nine. We leave him to stalk sadly through the long night of obloquy, with the thought :

La vie est vaine,
Un peu d'espoir,
Un peu de haine,
Et puis—bonsoir!

The storm of popular abuse no longer beat about his head, but it did not subside, and for several years following his retirement England continued to indulge in one of the most disgraceful outbursts of race hatred that these islands have witnessed since medieval times.

The collapse of the Bute regime marked the end of the second period in which Scotsmen were the central figures in English politics. Ninety long years were to pass away before the country saw another Scot occupying the office of Prime Minister, [John Gladstones, son of Thomas Gladstones, of Leith, was born on 11th December, 1764. His fourth son was William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of Great Britain. The Gladstone family illustrate, in a striking manner, the vast contribution which Scots have made towards England's development. Establishing himself as a corn merchant in Liverpool, John Gladstones (the name was changed to Gladstone) brought six of his brothers from Leith and set them going in Liverpool. By his second wife, Ann Robertson of Dingwall, he had four sons and two daughters, and three of the sons became members of the House of Commons. To-day the wide-spreading branches of the family reach into every part of England.] but, curiously enough, the link that bridged the years had already appeared, for in the very hour of Bute's downfall, John Gladstones, son of Thomas Gladstones, of Leith, Scotland, was born.