40 
in life all the world over as Scotland ; and nowhere can we 
meet with such an intelligent interest in the highest and 
deepest subjects amongst ordinary men of all ranks, as in 
Scotland. Statistics can be adduced to prove the superiority 
of Scotland, but it may be well seen in that highest branch of 
study, philosophy. In Mr. Rashdall’s work on the Univer- 
sities of Europe, we find the significant statement that between 
the time of Hutcheson and John Stuart Mill, a hundred years 
or more, a majority of the philosophers who wrote in the 
English language were either professors or alumni of Scotch 
Universities. It must be admitted too, that Scotland was in 
the forefront of the great geographical and imperial movement 
of the nineteenth century, and Smith, Murray, Mackinnon, 
Geikie, Park, Livingstone and others are the great names. 
We are well aware that when we institute comparisons 
between one people and another, or city or community, there 
are many factors in the equation besides size. But having 
made full allowance for race, climate, etc., what an astonishing 
contrast these small communities present to the mighty 
empires. Think of our greatest possessions in religion, 
literature, art, sculpture, and philosophy. It is hardly 
possible to fail the inference that there must surely be some- 
thing peculiarly favourable to the higher human aims and 
activities, the full and free development of aspiration and 
faculty, of gifts and powers, that otherwise would be dormant, 
in these little communities. These powers are elicited in 
the intense and striving life, in the friction and stimulus of 
comparatively small, independent and, in some cases, struggling 
or rival communities. Let us consider our own glorious 
age of Elizabethan literature. Is there no connection between 
our struggle for national independence, freedom from Popery, 
the true beginning of English greatness, and the names of 
Shakespeare, Spenser, Wyatt, Surrey, Sydney, Bacon, Marlowe, 
Raleigh and others ? Is it fortuitous that these events occur 
together, that the struggles of the Medici were synchronal 
with Florentine art and sculpture, that the Dutch war of 
independence was simultaneous with the Netherlandish 
school of painting ? 
These products are the result of an intense spirit and devotion 
to national and civic independence ; they are the compression 
of interest and faculties vitalised to creative activity. It is 
a spirit that seems to lose a great deal of its transforming and 
invigorating power in the mass of individuals when their lot 
is cast on some largely extended field of life, just as the mount- 
ain torrent loses its aerated sparkle and brilliancy and flows 
languidly on the sandy plain. The illustrations remind us 
