The friends of liberty
Robert Stewart
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue John Robertson (John Donald £18) What, you may say, has the Enlighten- ment, that affair of speculative philo- sophers and rationalist scientists, to do with the militia? What, moreover, was the militia issue? Well, we should not be surprised that great 18th-century minds should stoop to ponder how best to provide for the national defence. Like their Re- naissance progenitors, 18th-century men of letters scorned to be mere specialists. The barriers since erected between branches of knowledge scarcely existed for them. The Enlightenment, too, was a decidedly prac- tical business. It raised no eyebrows when Adam Smith turned to the not yet dismal science of trade and commerce when the world was still taking delight from his inquiry into the moral sentiments.
Smith's example is instructive, for the nub of 18th-century intellectual inquiry was the pursuit of virtue, the search for institutions which should most readily en- able men in a constitutional state to gain possession of their liberty from the long arm of authority and also to use that liberty to prosper the commonwealth. The 18th- century notion of liberty had a dual ances- try. From Machiavelli stemmed the tradi- tion of liberty as the freedom to participate in public affairs; virtue was public spirit and the willing shouldering of civic duties. From a more ancient jurisprudential tradi- tion derived the notion of liberty as free- dom from oppression; virtue was private cultivation of individual abilities.
John Robertson rightly elevates the later tradition to primacy in the campaign waged by the Scotch 'friends of liberty', especially the Moderate party (the literati led by William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and Alexander Carlyle), to establish a militia in Scotland. For although part of the argu- ment was the traditional 'country party' objection to standing armies as drains on the exchequer aid servile, mercenary tools of the power-grasping central government, the chief end was to find a means of transmuting Scotland's glorious martial past into a modern institutional framework which should both preserve the nation's separate identity and foster the growth of a commercial society outfitted with legal and political forms strong enough to wean Scotsmen from their feudal attachments and teach them the manners of a virtuous, participating citizenry.
Scotland, if it were to benefit from the union with England in 1707, required a political, commercial and military maturity —in short, a settled sense of national pride — capable of persuading the bright young men of future generations to resist the pull of London. The endeavour, as we know, was far from successful. By the end of the 18th century, when the English aristocracy was sending its sons to the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, English tutors were being employed to rid middle-class Scotch boys of their northern burr. And those boys — James Mill, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham, the list goes on and on — made their way to the metropolis to seek wealth and notice.
Pitt and the 'Patriots' succeeded in get- ting a militia for England' in 1757. But the threat of a French invasion of the North was insufficient to convince the imperial parliament, either during the Seven Years' War or during the War of American Independence, that Scotland deserved similar treatment. Part of the reason was the fear of arming a nation still tainted by Jacobitism. But if the memory of the '45 was powerful in 1757, when .the Seven Years' War was getting under way, it had shrunk to nothing by 1776. Nor was it that the advocates of a militia, who were able to cite David Hume in their support, failed to prepare their case. Mr Robertson shows that the case went far beyond the right and duty of the citizen to bear arms in his own defence. A militia would enable one of the redeeming qual- ities of clannish feudalism, the harmonious relations existing between classes, to sus- tain itself in Scotch culture; it would check the flow of Scotch men and money to the South; and it would remove less labour from Scotch manufacturers than a standing army (though the militia was frequently proposed as a companion, not an alterna- tive, to the regular forces). What went wrong? Mr Robertson seems to accept that the' chief reason, put forward by some commentators at the time, was the divided state of Scotch opinion itself. Yet, although the analysis which he provides is patchy, it appears to be so that a large majority of Scotsmen, especially the gentrY and county freeholders who mattered, made their ardour for a militia plain. It was not their fault that their opponents were happy to seize upon evidence of dissent, however muted, to bolster the case against. More careful inquiry into Westminster politics might help to settle the question, but it comes as no surprise to learn that the Duke of Newcastle, that most painstaking and adroit of wirepullers, eager to demons- trate that he could still command the Old Whig forces in parliament against Pitt and the 'Patriots', made opposition to the firsts Scotch bill a test of his authority. 01 course, he won, and it seems a bit hard to blame the Scots for his triumph. John Bull has been putting down Sister Peg for a long time. Had the Scotch majority in the 18th century been treated with justice and courtesy, there would have been a Scotch militia. But then, had courtesy and justice prevailed two centuries later, there would now be a legislature sitting in Edinburgh. Victory for the Moderate party and itS allies would scarcely have altered the course of Scotch history. All over Europe in the late 18th century, the enemies of standing armies were fighting a losing battle. They, of course, were not to knoW it, and Scotland's best minds entered the fray. Hence the interest of Mr Robertson's peculiar combination of local interest and European outlook which made intellectual life in Edinburgh the envy of Englishmen and provided a firm foundation for Scotch nationalist thought ever since. It is a pitY that the publishers (who, as far as I can see, have produced a book unsullied by 3 single misprint) did not shed their own small ray of light and identify the gentle- men whose faces decorate the jacket cover.
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