THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT


Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most
romantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch
blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known;
that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know it
is always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; that
they have an eye to business. I like that phrase "an eye" to business.

Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his forehead.
It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a
modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties of counting sheep
and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out he was done for.
But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though their best friends
must admit that they are occasionally business-like. They are, quite
fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and this is proved by the very
economic argument that is used to prove their harshness and hunger for the
material. The mass of Scots have accepted the industrial civilisation,
with its factory chimneys and its famine prices, with its steam and smoke
and steel--and strikes. The mass of the Irish have not accepted it. The
mass of the Irish have clung to agriculture with claws of iron; and have
succeeded in keeping it. That is because the Irish, though far inferior
to the Scotch in art and literature, are hugely superior to them in
practical politics. You do need to be very romantic to accept the
industrial civilisation. It does really require all the old Gaelic
glamour to make men think that Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle
is achieved; and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion. I have