I. A X D AND W A T !■ R 
March 9. iQiO. 
THE SCOTTISH IMBROGLIO. 
By Neoimperialist. 
THE Imnerial Task that is before the free peoples 
of (ireater Britain is that great task of con- 
solidation/jf the [Empire and the creation of an 
effective union, which shall conser\'e all the 
liberties and responsibilities, by some statesmanlike con- 
trivance that meets actual and likely difficulties of the 
future. And just as it will be unsound to depend merely 
on sentiment, so no arrangements will serve which are 
fuimd not to be realities but convenient hctions. 
Tliire are always seeds of disunion as well as of 
fellowship among groups of men, even of the same race, 
es|K'ciali\- if they ha\e widely-different environments 
and many necessarily conflicting economic interests. The 
numerically smaller groups naturally fear the tyranny of 
the larger and are very sensitive to any threat against 
their comi^lete autonomy. There are. besides, in every 
state those intransigeant minorities of ultra-nationalists, 
who see with a jiassionate intensity their own beloved 
corner of the world and ignore all outer, wider implica- 
tions. It is the great privilege of our time and of this 
crisis of oiu* history that we can set our eyes on the larger 
purpose, and look to tht; contrivance of a frame-work of 
indissoluble union, the formation of a greater British 
Commonwealth that shall be the most potent influence 
for peace and liberty that the world has yet known. 
A suggestion has been canvassed and has received 
distinguished support, because it seems to avoid the 
ditViculties of the situation which centre in the sensi- 
tiveness of the Dominions as to any dilution of their 
sovereign rights. It is to the effect that no closer ma- 
chinery of union is advisable than the existence of a 
common King, thereby creating a common loyalty, 
strengthened by the bond of common blood and common 
ideals. It is a characteristic attempt at the solution of 
difficulties by going round them instead of overcoming 
them. 
An interesting episode in our past history, the quarrel 
between England and Scotland, that came to a head at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century, provides a whole- 
some commentary on such a suggested solution. 
Scotland and England were united in i6o;i, not by 
deliberate act, but by the mere accident of coming 
under a common Crown. The whole of the 'cventcenth 
century, the most stormy in our history, which saw the 
execution of a King, the establishment of a Protectorate, 
the Restoration and the Revolution, was taken up with 
the adjustment of .Anglo-Scottish relations and the sturdy 
struggle of the Scots not to be absorbed or bullied by their 
larger and none-too-considerate partner. Though, at this 
period of our development, the Crown was held reasonably 
well in hand by Parliament, the despotic ideas of an earlier 
age had by no means disappeared. There were no 
Durhams in those days. England undoubtedly did treat 
Scotland dcspitefully as a vassal. Except under the 
brief and more liberal Cromwellian settlement, Scotland 
was pre\-ented by the Navigation Laws from profitable 
trade with America and the Indies. True this was not 
such a naked piece of tyranny as the plain statenun* ..f 
it suggests, but it was a serious disability. 
From this cause and others the northern kingdom 
became impoverished, and it was with a view to mitigating 
this widespread poverty that the foolishly spacious 
Darien scheme, conceived by Paterson, was fanatically 
patronised by Fletcher of Saltoun. Its ignominious 
failure created a storm of bitter anger in Scotland. The 
enterprise indeed was chiefly wrecked by the jealousy of 
the luiglish li^ast India Company, who intrigued very 
resourcefully to put it out of business, but in itself it was 
a profoundly futile project — an admirable instance of a 
jjolicy conceived with no corresponding armaments to 
give it sanction. The quarrel in its bitter course served 
a ver}' useful purpose in exposing in the most obvious 
way the hollowness of the contrivance on which the alleged 
union was based. Here was Scotland, at the back of the 
im))ulsivc h^letcher, demanding at once the protection 
of the English fleet for Scottish argosies, and at the same 
time working to defeat English interests, or England's 
notions of her interests ; and even demanding that Scot- 
land should have her own ambassadors to conduct her 
separate foreign relations. That is to say, English Heets 
might have been protecting the trade of Scotland in 
distant oceans, while the Scottish ambassador in Paris 
might be arranging an alliance with the French king as a 
threat to her own predominant partner. 
It was a good example of the attempt to combine the 
membership of two states, England and Scotland, and to 
obtain the benefits of both without sharing the respon- 
sibilities and burdens. There came the inevitable dis- 
ruption. The fiction broke down completely. The 
Scottish Parliament was for demanding a separate king and 
set about arming a militia for the inevitable war which 
such an extreme step involved according to the idi'as of 
the time. Some guiding spirit of sanity^ restrained the 
English Parliament. Her statesmen saw that the in- 
terests both of Scotland and of England were for a jx-ace- 
ful arrangement ; that, in jiarticular, the supri'me issues 
of national safety demanded such a settlement. Pi'rliai)s 
here was the faint dawn of that larger day of acconmioda- 
tion in place of coercion which has guided the Empire 
to her bloodless victories, a policy of which to-day in her 
hour of danger she is enjoying the reward. 
Common sense and a sense of common danger won. A 
true union was contrived under the Parliament of dreat 
Britain. A new state was founded with Englaml and 
Scotland as joint partners and with but one clear loyalty 
involved, a loyalty to the union, to Cireat Britain, of 
which both were constituent elements. 
It is not difficult to extract the salient lesson of tliese 
events. But in applying the moral of these facts to the 
problems of our day considerable allowances must be 
made for changes of time and circumstance, and no 
attempt made to press the parallel too far. Certainly 
no causes of quarrel which might now arise between the 
Five Nations would be complicated, as in this instance 
of Scotland, by dynastic difficulties. Again, and much 
more important, in these days the idea of full local 
autonomy, with centralisation merely for the supreme 
common purpose, had not been born. Which is to say 
that the conditions of union between England and Scot- 
land were naturally much more rigid than any that would 
be contemplated if such a union took place to-day ; when 
undoubtedly she would claim and without questi<in 
obtain a full measure of home rule. A lortiori, a claim 
to complete 'independence for all but the supreme 
common issues would be retained by the Dominions in 
any union, however close, with the Mother Country or 
with each other. And yet, the circumstances being 
even as they were, who will sa}' that Scotland was op- 
pressed or has not held her own from that day to this 
in the Commonwealth of Great Britain ? 
An acute outside observer, the American Lowell in 
his admirable treatise The Government of England, points 
out how completely the Scot was able to assert himself in 
the after arrangements of the two countries. How, for 
instance, he took part as by right in the chsputes concern- 
ing English and Irish affairs, but contrived a custom 
whereby Scottish affairs were in the main left to Scots 
Members. We know too, that they have their own law ; 
their own admirable system of education ; and how the 
Radical predispositions of a Scotch electorate have 
prevailed in the counsels of the nation. 
The dominant idea of those who put forward the 
suggestion of the union of the Dominions under a common 
king was the necessity, of safeguarding the nationality of 
the several Dominions. It was rightly held that no 
single diminution of their jirerogatives or their j)ower of 
inclependcnt development would be admitted by the 
robust and politically self-conscious nations of the 
Dominions. But why this inference that union can only 
be contrived at the expense of nationality ? It seems, 
on the contrary, that it would be all but impossible for 
the most perverse statesmanship now to contrive a union 
which would in any way threaten the supreme cause of 
the unfettered individualitv of each of the four allied 
nations. That cause is won for good and all and it has 
been recognised more and more consciously by every 
important Act that has established the relations between 
the several units of Empire for the last seventy years. 
