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Looking merely on the
surface, the eighteenth, compared with the seventeenth, might be described
as a tame century. Apart from the two Jacobite Risings in 1715 and 1745, it
is singularly undramatic. Politics lapsed to the level of the petty
animosities of Whig and Jacobite and these gradually died away after the
cause of the exiled Stuarts had received its death blow at Culloden.
Jacobitism survived only in the romantic songs in which a sentimental
allegiance to an impracticable ideal found pathetic expression. The Union
from which so much had been hoped, and for which so much had been
sacrificed, seemed for long a failure, and only five years after its
consummation a proposal was made in the Parliament at Westminster to
dissolve it. The eagerly expected prosperity did not come till well into the
century. The people had not the same interest in politics as in the days
when political and ecclesiastical affairs were debated and decided in the
Scottish Capital. Scottish members and purely Scottish questions figured
little in the greater assembly at Westminster, where Scottish interests were
as viewed by English politicians from the standpoint of those of English
parties. The limitation of the franchise to a handful of voters in both
burghs and counties (about 4000 in all) deprived politics of the magnetic
attraction of the days before the Union and the Revolution, when men and
parties contended over questions of such far-reaching importance in Church
and State. This political lassitude endured throughout the century when
Scotland, in marked contrast to the previous century, submitted to the
bureaucratic regime of "uncrowned kings" like Henry Dundas.
Happily, this stagnation was
confined, except in the political sphere, to the first half of the century.
The second half of it was a period of new vitality—which showed itself in a
marked transformation of the national life. The Union at last proved its
efficacy in the quickening of commerce, of which Glasgow was the great
centre. Industry made a great bound forward in the rapid development of the
linen, woollen, cotton, and iron manufacture to which the application of
improved machinery and especially the inventive genius of James Watt gave a
powerful impulse. Agriculture shared in the advance of other industries in a
remarkable degree. Shipbuilding and the improvement of communication by land
by the construction of roads and canals greatly favoured commercial and
industrial expansion and social progress. In literature, science,
philosophy, art, education, Scotland sprang from the mediocrity of former
days into a brilliant position among the nations. Its social life also
underwent a marked betterment in many respects as the result of the
accumulating wealth which raised the rate of wages and the standard of
living. Its religion lost much of its old narrowness and crudeness under the
influence of a broader culture. The energy which in the previous century had
exhausted itself with such grim intensity in violent political and
ecclesiastical contention was directed into the channel of practical life.
The second half of the eighteenth century equally with the seventeenth may
be described as a period of revolution. Only the revolution takes the form,
not of a convulsion of the body politic, but of a truly formative, if less
obtrusive process of industrial and social advance. |
