Compton Mackenzie
VISIT to Denmark has left me wondering what would be the effect on Scotland of a visit by every Scot to that country, with a population four-fifths of that of Scotland's, with many problems of transport similar to those of Scotland, with less natural advantages for agriculture, cattle and sheep, and with a climate neither better nor worse. I cannot help feeling that the effect of such a visit would be a lively encouragement to those romantic theorists who contend that Scotland could be a self-supporting national entity. When the problems of housing and transport solved by Denmark are compared with the problems of housing and transport still far remote from being solved in Scotland, the achievement of Denmark is so remarkable that one searches for a reason to explain why Scotland is so far behind. Indeed, several Danish enquirers asked me why the country whose sons were primarily responsible for the development of the British Empire should seem unable now to set an example to the rest of the world. I could reply that in spite of the German occupa- tion during the last war Denmark had escaped the feirful strain of two world wars, but it appeared a lame excuse and I was driven into explaining that what was seeming the rapid narrowing of the field for Scottish enterprise overseas had tem- porarily at any rate produced in Scottish youth a state of mental indecision about the future.
A quarter of a century ago it was impossible to address a political meeting on the subject of Home Rule for Scotland without being asked by several members of the audience, ` Who is running the Empire ? ' and, the answer being obvious, what need was there to bother about Home Rule ? Today that question is never heard : the most imperially-minded heckler is mute. The young Scot today knows that as a Scotsman he will be a welcome immigrant in any of the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, but he feels that Scots have already done very much more than their fair share of emigration and he is disinclined to take jobs at a time of what seems to him the general surrender .of British imperial policy, except of course to an island of half a million inhabitants like Cyprus.
Two 'weeks ago the Spectator published an article on the Report of the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs by Alec Sturrock. ' Scots Stormont Rejected ' was a typical sample of the soothing syrup which the Glasgow Herald has been administering for over a hundred years in the belief that it is a panacea. On the eve of the Rectorial election in 1931 that venerable pedagogue warned me that I must regard myself as a political candidate who had invited the students of Glasgow University to express an opinion about the ridiculous demand for Home Rule and that I must accept the verdict of Scottish youth as a political verdict. Unfortunately for the Glasgow Herald's faith in its own prescience enough students decided in favour of Home Rule to get me elected as Rector whereupon the Glasgow Herald turned an editorial somersault and warned me that no political significance whatever must be attached to the Nationalist victory.
And now here we are again. The Royal Commission after a gestation longer than that of an elephant has been delivered of a mouse, and an albino mouse at that. Yet Alec Sturrock is able with the magical aid of that soothing syrup bottled in the editorial offices to discover in this white mouse the features of a Solomon and to detect in its squeak the voice of the Delphic Oracle. ' the voluntary union of two proud peoples,' the Report suggests that the Secretary of State for Scotland should take over the responsibility for Scottish roads from the Ministry of Transport. ` But one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack !' And even that ha'porth of bread has been deprived of its vitamins, for who supposes that the Secretary of State will be able to extract any more money out of the Treasury than the Minister of Transport could '? But I was forgetting. There is another recommendation, which is that in future Scottish JPs shall be nominated by the Secretary, of State instead of the Lord Chancellor. If that recommendation be adopted every Scottish heart will beat faster and every Scottish head will be held higher.
I do not suggest that Alec Sturrock is deliberately misleading his English readers. 1 am sure he really does believe that Nationalist propagandists have been ' extravagantly building up student escapades into deeds of considered patriotism.' Nevertheless, that complacent attitude of early middle-age, the age that is always most blind to the way youth is going, is a dangerous one. The last thing any sane Scottish Nationalist wants, to encourage is the growth of anti-English feeling. 'Every sane Scottish Nationalist knows that the people of England as a whole have no more desire to coerce Scotland than they have to coerce Cyprus. The small space accorded in the English Press to the Report of the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs reflects the amount of interest that editors rightly suppose their readers take in Scottish affairs. What sane Nationalists fear is that perhaps within the next decade the blindness of politicians and the obstinacy of bureaucrats by refusing to conciliate Scottish opinion now may create an irreconcilable body, of fanatical 'young patriots content with nothing less than absolute separation from England, and by creating that body will revive the old hostility between the two nations which we had supposed gone for ever. I write these words with as little hope as Cassandra of their being heeded. It is much easier to swallow bromide and believe that Scotland agrees with the Royal Commission in rejecting a Scots Stormont. Yet in the future that Royal Commission may wish that they had given different advice, because if the present mood of Scottish youth should be misjudged and mishandled a Scots Stormont may be rejected much more contemptuously in due course. In 1928 in the course of an article supporting Cunningham° Graham's candidature for the Rectorship of Glasgow University I wrote : `If Home Rule is to be the affair of milk with a lot of water added from the parish pump, which is what the Labour Party calls Home. Rule, better it should be postponed indefinitely.'
One might go on arguing for ever round the parish pump, but it would lead us no nearer to the crux of the problem. It is not the denial of the Forth Bridge which is gnawing at the hearts of young Scottish patriots: it is a profound malaise about the future of their country in the world that seems likely to emerge from the present and the consequent impulse to remould it to their hearts' desire. The mountains and the sea are hostile to communism and therefore communism makes no progress in Scotland. Moreover, a country with such a long history of true democracy and at the same time such a respect for the individual could not accept a political system which enslaves the individual to create a false democracy. The youth of Scotland, now denied the opportunity of expressing themselves on an imperial scale, wish to make something of their own country in the new world, and something more galvanic than the long gestations of Royal Commissions will be required to restrain them.
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