Mr, William Bell's Rip Van Scotland (Palmer. 2s. 6d.) is,
as its title implies, a stinging challenge to Scotland (which the author in derisively subtle irony calls Seotlandshire) to wake up. To wake up to its rapid anglicization, to the existence of its hideous slums, to an unemployment roll 50 per cent, greater than in England, to the decay of its very language. Mr. Bell deplores the decline of a real national sentiment in Scotland; • the alcoholic kind that leaps to light at Burns banquets and insists that "freedom an' whisky gang thegither " is a thewless bastard. The remedy is the restoration to Scotland of complete self-government, under which condition alone can any people fully express its national. genius. The Scot can run the Empire. why does he not try to run his own country ? But before he does try and if Scottish Home Rule is to be of any avail, Mr. Bell, in a long excursus on the abject dependence of politics on high finance, strongly urges the • adoption of the Douglas theorem, that the power of credit-control must be taken out of the hands of private individuals or corporations who use it for personal profit.
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