The Scottish Conspiracy Trial
From time to time an incident occurs which suggests the extent to which England and Scotland are separate countries. The recent trial in Edinburgh, upon charges of conspiracy and the possession of gelignite and weapons with intent to endanger life and cause injury to property, of four young Scottish Nationalists, was one such—and a striking one. Few people in England have done more than gather that there is a lunatic fringe of Scottish Nationalist politics in which men can be found to imitate the most socially dangerous tactics of the IRA—fortunately with the greatest ineptitude. In Scotland the reaction has been very different. There the trial has been a cause célèbre of the first order, monopolising conversation and causing anxiety and indignation. People who are unpolitical and unsympathetic to Nationalism—ministers and elders, writers to the Signet, landowners and plumbers and bookmakers —have been united in a profound uneasiness about police methods and tools on the one hand and the political control of events upon the other. Many would say that the former were dirty and the latter crass, and few could be found who would wholeheartedly defend them. The case—as disturbing and perhaps as far-reaching as it is fantastic—is discussed in detail on a later page by Sir Compton Mackenzie.
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