The Lion and the Unicorn

What England Has Meant to Scotland

Eric Linklater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000449273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia scozzese

Originally published in 1935 and authored by a supporter of Scottish Nationalism, this book ascribes many of Scotland's misfortunes in history to the sectarian wars and those of Edward I, as well as the havoc wrought by the Industrial Revolution and the decay of Scotland's successive cultures. Reduced to political impotence by the early 20th Century and severed from that contact with Europe which fostered its early culture, the author feels its national life dwindled. Many of the themes surrounding Scottish identity and independence are once again part of today's political debate.

VIII
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

VIII
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

I SPEAK as a Tory, or as some kind or degree of a Tory: and an admirable statement of the Tory conception of society may be found in Lord Eustace Percy’s contribution to a book entitled Conservatism and the Future. The statement is in two parts: first, ‘that society is healthy in proportion as the greatest possible number of its members possess a recognized status not dependent upon the will of their fellow citizens;’ and second, ‘that no society can be healthy where the individual does not enjoy freedom of movement within the social framework, irrespective of the position in it which he occupied at birth.’

Crystallize these complementary assertions, and the emergent jewel is Freedom: freedom to stay, and freedom to go; freedom to sit and to contemplate, to create and assess, and freedom to mount and to march. But these freedoms must be mutually con siderate, they must respect one another, and the marching freedom must not tread down the gardens of contemplative freedom. The individual is all-important, and the function of the State is to safeguard his security, to provide humus for his growth, and to penalize abuse of the liberty it has established.

Such a belief is not popular to-day. For yesterday and to-day men have discovered theory and practice that insistently depreciate the individual. Fascism and its unpleasant brother Hitlerism on the one hand; that well-intentioned Frankenstein, Communism, on the other; and between them, more tripes than muscle, the remnant belly of Imperialism: Imperialism dependent on an echo of the past and a growing skill in usury.

These systems variously deny or depreciate the value and status of the individual, though British Imperialism in its old age has become in many ways increasingly kind and humanitarian. It is not my business to discuss the historical background of Hitlerism; the moral indignation that palliates the brutality and futility of Communism; or the improvement in travelling facilities in Italy that in the opinion of many justifies Fascism. But the decline of British Imperialism is within the scope of my argument, for it has been accompanied by decay of the Tories’ old conception of society, and overgrowth has been responsible for both decline and decay. It is true that the individual in Great Britain has still infinitely more freedom than Germans, Italians, and Russians, but the old common lands of liberty have suffered legislative encroachment in many ways; the private citizen’s sense of personal responsibility has diminished; and to have freedom without responsibility is merely to live in a kind of extension of Whipsnade.

Now such is the stubborn impercipience of humanity that there may be people who will question some statements here, and so before I make the point which I am about to make—which is that the Tory conception of society can only be realized in a comparatively small society—before I state this, I had better buttress my previous assertions with a few auxiliary details. And for this purpose the interlocutory Practical Man may again be useful.

PRACTICAL MAN. You are foolishly prejudiced against Communism, Fascism, and the Nazi régime. It seems likely to me that the people of any civilized country must be capable of selecting that kind of government which suits them best; and the co-citizens of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler would certainly be justified not only in resenting your remarks, but in dismissing them as wanton impertinence.

LINKLATER. I form my own opinions—when I cannot find ready-made ones that suit me—and I claim the right to express them. Your assumption, moreover, that the governments we are discussing were chosen and are maintained by popular acclaim, is, I fear, unwarranted by the facts.

PRACTICAL MAN. You can’t deny that all three now enjoy the enthusiastic support of the vast majority of their people.

LINKLATER. That proves nothing. In the last Grand National a horse called Golden Miller had the enthusiastic support of the vast majority of backers. But he didn’t win.

PRACTICAL MAN. You gain nothing by flippancy. I would ask you seriously to consider the probability that your ideas about personal liberty—which you say are part of the Tory conception of society, but which I would describe as the Liberal view—are romantic anachronisms, and no more suited to the modern state than hansom-cabs to modern traffic conditions.

LINKLATER. Precisely. That’s why I don’t like the modern state. It has grown so big and so complicated that standardization of its component parts is becoming increasingly necessary—in many parts of the world habit and opinion are already like castings on a conveyor-belt in a motor-car factory—and to standardize men is to debase them. The remedy, obviously, is to abolish the necessity of standardization: that is, reduce the size and therefore the complications of the modern state. Simplify the state—but not too far: there’s an optimum of simplicity—and your citizens will have a chance to become exquisitely variable, subtle, and ripe.

PRACTICAL MAN. But throughout history the tendency of the state—the successful state—has been to grow, to enlarge its boundaries, to become a complex of states, and to unite its resulting differences by imposing on them a uniformity of custom and law. That is the historical tendency, and I don’t see how you can reverse it. You can’t put back the clock.

LINKLATER. Why not? Hitler put back the clock when he re-introduced the executioner’s axe. Mussolini put back the clock when he suppressed freedom of speech. We all put back the clock—to 1911 or thereabouts—when we began this new armaments race. It seems to me that clocks go backwards just as easily as forwards.

PRACTICAL MAN. I was talking about the whole trend of society: of humanity, if you like: and all you can find to refute my assertion is a minor trio of political expedients. Now let us ignore, for the moment, the political aspect of the matter: I merely say—and I challenge you to deny it—that man’s tendency, throughout recorded history, has been to associate himself with his fellow-men, in ever-increasing numbers, for the ever-increasing satisfaction of his ever-increasing needs and desires. Evolution has created the modern state of 50,000,000 inhabitants, just as surely as evolution has created man himself. And whatever you may do to clocks, nothing can interfere with evolution.

LINKLATER. Oh, nonsense. Nature is constantly interfering with evolution. Whenever the evolutionary tree puts out an unproductive branch, Nature comes along, diverts the sap from it, lops it off, and redirects the resultant surplus of energy elsewhere. Remember the brontosaurus. It grew too big, and its brain failed to keep pace with the growth of its body: ergo exeunt the brontosauruses. Now in many respects the modern state, of 50,000,000 inhabitants or so, is not unlike that doomed and superfluous dinosaur: for if you compare Great Britain of to-day with Athens in its prime you will readily perceive that though it is infinitely greater in size, the growth of its intellectual capacity has hardly been commensurate: for whereas the Athenian shopkeeper found recreation in the plays of Aristophanes, the British shopkeeper—and indeed British citizens of all classes—acquire a comparable pleasure from the flickering ephemera of the popular film. This, however, is merely a negative argument against bulk. A positive and convincing argument can be found in Viola Meynell’s excellent poem called Jonah and the Whale. The Whale, as you may remember, had twice been wounded by harpoons: an old corroding iron was buried in his flesh, another lance stuck in his hide: but

‘So distant were his parts that they

Sent but a dull faint message to his brain.’

You see the likeness? In Great Britain there may be acute distress in Renfrewshire, for example, that, because of distance, ‘sends but a dull faint message’ to our legislative brain in Westminster.

PRACTICAL MAN. Your Whale, I think, is little more than a Red Herring. We were discussing the social aspect of human evolution, and I had stated that mankind’s historical tendency was to coalesce in ever larger political, economic, and social units. You cannot contradict that. Further, I was about to suggest—when you interrupted me—that this tendency promised most interesting developments: for as the coalescence becomes larger, it must become closer, and the increasing interdependence of individual lives may well produce, and is indeed producing, something far more vital and integrated than any existing class or society; that is to say, a communal organism such as the termitory on the hive. Solomon told the sluggard to go to the ant for instruction. He should have repeated his advice to historians, economists, and politicians. For with such perfection of organization before us, we can hardly doubt that the ant-hill is the true exemplar of society, and that loss of individuality is a small price to pay for such an efficient technique of living.

LINKLATER. God help you. I can’t abuse you, because my store of invective is insufficient for such a case as yours. I can only reiterate my belief in the value of the individual, and repeat that small states are better than big ones, because they demand less regimentation, and so offer greater opportunity for individual freedom. No, I can do more. I can cite some distinguished authorities for my view. Aristotle, if I remember rightly, said that the supreme function of man was the soul’s activity in accordance with reason: now the soul is an individual possession, reason an individual product: diminish the individual by the regimentation of the modern state of 50,000,000 inhabitants, and you circumscribe his soul, you hamstring his power of reason.

PRACTICAL MAN. I have spoken to many Nazis and Fascists—I choose them for example because regimentation is more obvious in Germany and Italy than it is here—and they all agree that under their existing régime they have a far greater freedom than ever before. They are free from doubt and anxiety.

LINKLATER. They are free from the searching of reason and the invitations of criticism. They are free to believe in what they are told, and to do what they are ordered. They are free to take their opinions off a conveyor-belt.

PRACTICAL MAN. They have voluntarily abandoned all petty preoccupation with themselves because they believe that their Race and their State are so infinitely greater than any individual, that the fate of an individual is of no consequence in comparison with the welfare of the whole.

LINKLATER. Christian teaching hardly substantiates such a view. Need I remind you of the parable about the price of two sparrows? I may be wrong, of course, in my respect for the individual, but if I am wrong I am in good company—I have already mentioned Aristotle—and I hope you will not think it presumptuous of me if I enlarge one of Dostoievsky’s obiter dicta and say: ‘I would rather be with Christ—and Aristotle—than the truth’?

PRACTICAL MAN. I don’t care what company you’re in. I would like to know, however, what all this has to do with England’s influence on Scotland?

LINKLATER. Well, I started the chapter, very gently and tactfully, with a statement of the Tory conception of society, which I approve, and I was going to proceed to the obvious corollary that such a conception was only possible in a comparatively small society—that Great Britain, for instance, was too big for its realization, but that Scotland might well be suitable—when I realized that I had made a number of assertions which everybody might not be immediately willing to accept. So I called you in to debate them, and insensibly—but that perhaps is an invidious word—we were drawn into discussion of some wider issues.

PRACTICAL MAN. You’re right when you say that some of your statements aren’t likely to meet with much approval. You spoke, for example, about the decline of Great Britain: and that was simply the conventional carping of the constitutional malcontent. Britain has emerged, practically intact, from twenty years of extravagandy assorted difficulties, hardships, perils, and dilemmas. Its people have shown all the endurance, gallantry, and loyalty that we have learned to expect from them, and its rulers have displayed a most happy combination of resolution and flexibility. We have shown a far greater capacity than other peoples for dealing with the problems of world-wide depression, and having weathered the economic blizzard——

LINKLATER. We have turned the economic corner. I know, I know. There is a great deal of truth in what you say, and a good lot that is not true. But when I spoke of decline I was thinking rather of what might have been: of declining purpose; of failure to turn good into better; of shrinking, as we used not to shrink, from opportunity. For after the War—this is going to be platitudinous—Great Britain had such an opportunity for leadership as few nations have ever had. The whole earth was still full of the feeling that the War had been a war to end war, to make life safe for democracy—and vice versa—and to bring in a new age of decency. Great Britain had the necessary authority, experience, and apparatus to offer such leadership. We had led the world in so many ways—in war, in navigation, in trade, in administration—that surely we might have led it in a new way of peace, and liberty, and fraternity.

PRACTICAL MAN. H’m.

LINKLATER. Perhaps you’re right. Anyway, we didn’t. Nor did we do anything else positive or decisive. We simply managed to survive. And the reason for our failure to be positive or constructive was, I take it, much the same as the reason for our failure, during most of the War, to undertake any constructive or decisive operation on the Western Front: the armies were too large to be effectively controlled; the situation was too various to be adequately assessed; the sides of the triangle—Headquarters, Left Flank, and Right Flank—were too long; elasticity could not compete with inertia; time-lag upset the time-tables; the multiplication of possibilities of human error invalidated the power of direction; and, above all, imagination was stifled by too cumbrous circumstance, and lost in so vast an environment. Now Britain and its leaders suffer from disabilities comparable to those of the armies on the Western Front: the poor Brontosaurus, you see, with a brain no longer capable of directing so large a bulk. We failed to take a leading or formative part in the new world that shone, for a little while, wistfully on our horizon. We failed signally to make our own country—is it indecent to remind you of the phrase?—that land fit for heroes which our politicians had promised. And why? Because the Brontosaurus’s poor little head had no notion what to do with the creature’s huge tail, its ridiculous great haunches, its splay feet, and the enormous geography of its back. Though it moved its head into shelter, its rump stuck out in the storm. Part of it wanted to go this way, part of it was resolute to go t’other. It would clap its hands to announce a brilliant idea; but its hinderlands were asleep and didn’t hear it. It sat on a cactus, but its bottom was so far from its brain that its brain didn’t know it was hurt.—Are you beginning to realize the cogency of my illustration and the relevance of my disquisition?

PRACTICAL MAN. In plain words, you’re saying that Britain is too large to be efficiently directed or governed?

LINKLATER. That is so. And I assume the criterion of efficiency to be a resultant increase of human happiness.

PRACTICAL MAN. But in your chapter called Addenda and Corrigenda you spoke at some length about the recent benefits to Scotland of social legislation. You spoke about the humanitarian policy of successive governments. You said the labouring classes in Scotland were far better cared for than they had been. And so, presumably, they are happier than they used to be.

LINKLATER. I am trying to be fair to both sides, and that makes any argument difficult. I said that many abuses of the nineteenth century had been done away with. I said that towns were cleaner and life was healthier than it used to be. I said that many compensations were now provided for the injustices of a large industrial civilization. But the injustices remain, though they are somewhat obscured by the compensations. What recent governments have done is to palliate the diseases inherited from their predecessors.

PRACTICAL MAN. And thereby they have added to the people’s happiness, and so, by your own standards, demonstrated their efficiency.

LINKLATER. They have rather soothed unhappiness. They have made the patient more comfortable. They have treated symptoms but not the disease.

PRACTICAL MAN. I’m afraid I can’t waste any more time on splitting hairs. I have an important engagement elsewhere.

LINKLATER. Well, I intend to stay here for some considerable time yet. But I hope you have a good round. Good-bye!

My point, I think, is obvious: the most unfortunate result of Scotland’s association with England has been the immersion of Scotland in a modern brontosaurian state of nearly 50,000,000 inhabitants. A state, that is, too large to permit the realization of the old Tory conception of society, that conception being the political corollary of a truth recognized by, and fundamental in, the two greatest cultures known to mankind, the Greek and the Christian.

It was Rupert Brooke, I think, who said, in some letter, that of all men poets were the most pra...