gave battle before Stirling Brig; and, in the midst of mediaeval
diplomacies, made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality of
Scotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in
the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying to
be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full (as its
history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. The wageslavery
we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which the Scotch
are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their
Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most
thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what makes the Master of
Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry. It
is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or (what is worse) magic.
Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something of this fierce
romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and serfdoms; the
proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then, in Scotland,
the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean the self-made
man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as well as to others.
It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is quite mad, and a much
more obvious public pest than any other kind of kleptomaniac; but though
he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does exist; I have met quite two
of him. Him alone among modern merchants we do not weakly flatter when we
call him a bandit. Something of the irresponsibility of the true dark
ages really clings about him. Our scientific civilisation is not a
civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance. Like smoke it is choking us; like
smoke it will pass away. Only of one or two Scotsmen, in my experience,
was it true that where there is smoke there is fire.

But there are other kinds of fire; and better. The one great advantage of
this strange national temper is that, from the beginning of all chronicles,
it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotland nearly