Scotland's influence on civilization

Chapter I. Scotland's Place In History

THE land of the thistle and the heather, the castle and the crag, is at best but a narrow land — two hundred and eighty-eight miles between extremes from north to south, and fifty-two from east to west. Its place in history, however, is well assured, and its influence is wide as the world. Its physical aspect is exceedingly diversified and picturesque. The sky bends in beauty, the soil teems with verdure, the air rings in elastic tension, the waters sparkle with life and health. It is a land where youth may drink in exhilaration with every breath, manhood find food for high endeavor in every battle of life, and old age flourish like the evergreen pine. With a coastline of twenty-five hundred miles so deeply indenting the main land on three sides as to bring every foot of it within forty-five miles of the sea, with nearly eight hundred islands closely environing it and furnishing many a quiet inlet and many a bold outlook to the ocean, and with an alternating panorama of highland and lowland, of lake, river and mountain, through all its borders, — Scotland would seem to be the spot of all the earth ordained by Providence for the dwelling-place of a hardy, athletic, gallant race.

Such, in fact, have been its destiny and its history. It is not the country, but the heroic people inhabiting it, that has given Scotland its name in history and its influence on the world's civilization. And the object of this monograph is to sketch in briefest outline a few salient points in the character of the people, the work they have done and the influence they have exerted.

Who has not admired the genius and gloried in the heroism of that long line of "Scottish worthies" who fought as if they were fighting the battles of all mankind and gave their names to history as an everlasting remembrance ? Who has not followed them down from century to century and often felt his indignation ablaze at the recital of their wrongs and their sacrifices for truth and for conscience' sake? What associations crowd upon us, what memories awake, what inspirations kindle, at the mention of such names as Bruce and Wallace, Knox and Melville, Argyle and Murray, Gillespie and Henderson,

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Erskine and Chalmers, Scott and Burns, Livingstone and Alexander Duff!

It is instructive to notice the part which the little nationalities of the earth have played in the grand drama of civilization. We hear much about the " great powers " and how they shape the destiny of the world. History, both ancient and modern, has much to tell us of their majesty, their broad domain, their almost omnipotent sway. The old world powers of the Orient — Assyria, Chaldea, Egypt, Medo-Persia, Macedonia, Rome — all figure largely on the pages of the past, each claiming in its turn the mastery of the world. In more recent times the great races of Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Turkey, England, have almost monopolized the map of Europe, where they still struggle for the balance of power. Is this the sum of the old-world civilized history? The whole tale is not told until we have looked at the little nationalities — Palestine, Greece, Venetia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland — each on its narrow strip of soil and with its wide influence on the world. Where has the human race risen to higher glory in the prowess of the individual man or in the achievements of the body politic than in these " pent-up Uticas " of the rocks or seas ? Here is a belt of once-independent states, small isolated nations, stretching diagonally across the very heart of the civilized world from south-east to north-west.

S SCOTLAND'S INFLUENCE.

on the very line of march which civilization followed when it left the East and made the history of modern Europe. There is something sublime in the influence which has gone out over all time from these apparently insignificant corners of the earth. There is something which seems to point to an invisible and almighty hand that can work alike by many or by few, and that often with the smallest means accomplishes its greatest works.

Strike from history these five or six lesser nationalities, and who then could tell the whole story of arts and arms, of literature and philosophy, of national independence, of civil and religious liberty? The Maccabean deliverers of Palestine, the Greeks at Marathon, the Venetian masters of the seas, the Swiss compatriots of William Tell, the heroes of the Dutch republic, the Scots of Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn, belong to all nations and to all time. They have done much to make the larger nations what they were, and to make the world what it is. Palestine gave the world a religion — the first, the last, the best, the only divine, religion. Greece gave it art, literature, philosophy, the highest which human genius unassisted ever attained. Venice gave it the earliest essays in that skill of finance and commerce which has since ruled all civilized nations. Switzerland and Holland gave it the earliest practical demonstration of those re-

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publican institutions which to-day constitute the civic glory of the American national Union. Scotland, besides other great gifts, has bequeathed to it the finest example to be found in all Christendom of a thoroughly-educated, law-abiding, free and Christianized people.

In some respects there is a marked parallel between Scotland and Greece — the one at the extreme north-west, the other at the extreme south-east, of Europe; the one jutting out high upon the Atlantic, the other overlooking the Mediterranean waters — Scotland being somewhat the larger of the two. Both are peninsular terminations of a larger territory and deeply interpenetrated by surrounding seas. They are wholly different in climatic influences, the one looking southward over sunny and pacific seas which greatly modify the conditions of all animal and vegetative life, the other facing northward over wild and tempest-tossed waters with no protecting barrier against the storms of the frozen ocean. Each alike, however, is marvelously beautified by every changing mood of hill and valley, forest and mountain-chain. Each alike is, or was, the native home of a race of heroes, the birthplace of a long and glorious history in the days of its independence. Europe had but one Greece, the abode of the Muses, the battle-ground of the giants, the alma mater of science, philosophy and literature. And Europe has had but one Scot-

IO SCOTLAND'S INFLUENCE.

land for that older realm of beauty. Byron perhaps sang too sad a requiem in the line,

" Tis Greece, but living Greece no more;"

for when the iron yoke of the Turk shall be broken — as broken it will be — Greece is yet to awake to a new and nobler destiny. Scotland, however, needs no requiem. Her separate nationality is indeed gone, but no iron yoke has ever crushed her spirit. 'Tis Scotland — living Scotland — still; and the later glory outshines the earlier.

The sceptre of dominion has passed from the old capital and passed into other hands, but the heroic race is still there in all its pristine vigor, undegenerated, unconquered, well worthy of the national emblem, and now as ever ready to make good its old motto : " Nemo me impune lacesset." The rugged hills and granite rocks that had so often given it shelter in the hour of disaster were not more indestructible than was the hardy life-blood which flowed through Scottish veins during all those years of conflict. That persistent purpose of a brave and united people who loved liberty as they loved life itself, that undefeated and unconquerable national spirit which had showed itself so strong in Wallace and Bruce, at last asserted its power and its right to the soil in the just and equal terms of the national compact with England. This compact of incorporation

PLACE IN HISTORY. II

healed all past breaches and made the larger and the smaller kingdoms one and inseparable for all time. Nothing of honor, nothing of independence, nothing of true national glory, was lost to the Scot in becoming a North Briton : it was an alliance of equals for the common weal and the common defence of Britain. Unlike other regions of the Old World when smaller nationalities have been crushed under the heel of despotic power, the traveler of to-day in Scotland finds no memorials there of subjection and degeneracy : all there is life and freedom. The same glorious race that existed a thousand years ago is still at home upon its soil, only more advanced in all the elements of true national greatness, and the nobler, too, because of all the fiery trials of the past.

Chapter II. The Long Struggle For Liberty

THE most impressive spectacle in history is not the march of mighty armies led by a conqueror and treading down all opposition under the iron heel of War, but a gallant people standing on the line of right within its own borders and there heroically defending its firesides and its institutions of civil and religious freedom against overwhelming numbers. Such was the attitude of Scotland, and such the sublime spectacle of her intrepid race, through the long wasting wars that reddened all her southern borders and at times extinguished many of her noblest families. In all history it would be difficult to find a more enduring and heroic people.

The present population of Scotland is upward of three millions. At the date of the final reunion and incorporation with England, near the opening of the eighteenth century, the whole Scottish people did not exceed one million. In all probability there had been no preceding period during the long eventful history in which the number of inhabitants was not considerably less than a million. 12

THE LONG STRUGGLE EOR LIBERTY. 1 3

Ten centuries of bloody, desolating warfare had often decimated the race and cut short illustrious lines. Less than two centuries of peaceful agriculture, manufacture and commerce, under the genial sway of science, literature, religion, rudimental education, artistic culture, philosophical research and free constitutional government, have been sufficient to treble the home-population even while an adventurous foreign emigration has been carrying its uncounted myriads abroad to people every continent and every island of the ocean with Scotsmen. The grandest lesson of modern history — that peace, not war, is the true policy of nations, the ars artium of all human progress — was never more strikingly illustrated than it has been in the history of Scotland.

Since the Union of 1707, Scotland has constituted an integral portion of the British empire, having voluntarily yielded up her separate nationality after defending it with gallant success for more than a thousand years. In the early spring of 1603, on the death of Queen Elizabeth, James VI. of Scotland, uniting in himself the royal titles to the crowns of both kingdoms, had quietly ascended the English throne. Edinburgh lost her royal court, but for a hundred years longer Scotland was still in possession of her Parliament and her independence, the joint-sovereign reigning over the two still separate kingdoms. But in the year 1706 the Scottish Parliament met for the last time. The members, at the opening, rode, as was the custom, in slow and solemn procession up the old Canongate of Edinburgh from Holyrood Palace to the Parliamenthouse. The act of union was passed by the two Parliaments, and on the 1st of May in the year following the two rival kingdoms became one; the court was transferred to London, and the government merged into the one Parliament of Great Britain. The two nations in the long course of their history had met each other in three hundred and fourteen pitched battles, and had sacrificed more than a million of men as brave as ever wielded claymore, sword or battle-axe. Against superior numbers and amidst unparalleled disasters the lesser realm had fearlessly maintained its independence from the days of Kenneth MacAlpine to those of Robert Bruce, and from Bruce down to the last of the Stuart pretenders. When, however, the Scottish people at last yielded to the inexorable logic of events and accepted the situation, they went into the Union with a brilliant record and an unsullied escutcheon. They had covered themselves with glory (at times nothing else had been left to cover with), and they carried with them as the best prestige for the future the grandest of all remembrances — the remembrance of a heroic national history. The Scot had now become a North Briton, but Scotland was living Scotland still.

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" Deep-graven on her breast she wore The names of all her valiant dead, And with the great inscription felt As Douglas with De Bruce' s heart — That she was still a conqueror."

The fundamental principle of the union with England was that of a complete incorporation of the two nationalities in one government under one sovereign head and one representative Parliament, with equal rights and privileges for the people and a proportionate burden of the common taxation. The conditions of the problem then settled and the greatness of that settlement are well stated in the following sentences from Charles Knight's History of England: "The complete union of two independent nations, to be brought about by common consent and the terms to be settled as in a commercial partnership, was an event which seems natural and easy when we look to the geographical position of the two nations and to the circumstance that they had been partially united for a century under six sovereigns wearing the crown of each kingdom. But when we look to the long-standing jealousies of the two nations, their sensitive assertion of ancient superiority, the usual haughty condescension of the wealthier country, the sturdy pride of the poorer, the ignorance of the bulk of each people of the true character of the other, the differences of the prevailing forms of religion, the more essential differences of laws and their modes of administration, — we may consider the completion of this union as one of the greatest achievements of statesmanship."

It was, in fact, an admirable adjustment of all the old grievances and a fitting close to the feuds and animosities, inherited from generation to generation, which had kept the neighboring kingdoms in perpetual strife. If they had continued to fight each other to the present day, they could not have received an adjustment more honorable and advantageous to both parties. The weaker kingdom lost nothing by becoming an integral part of a greater kingdom, and the greater lost nothing, but gained much, by uniting its destiny with a powerful race that should henceforward contribute its full share to the national greatness. The Scot only relinquished a smaller for a more enlarged and permanent independence. He found a more solid and enduring basis for that national independence and that constitutional liberty in defence of which he had so often drawn the sword. There could have been no better, nobler termination of the long and bloody conflict. He had, indeed, gained all for which he had ever fought. The royal race of his native land — that race which in the person of Bruce had struggled so hard to retain its independent throne — was now upon a greater throne, the throne of United Britain. That small and often turbulent Parliament of his

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ancient capital had ceased only to give place to another and more powerful Parliament of the united nation, of which he was to be a constituent member, and of which the Scottish people, like the English, were to be independent electors. The lesser nationality was not lost, but merged into the greater. The people who could look back through a long line of heroes never quailing before the face of battle surrendered no dignity by a voluntary union into which they carried such a history.

It was a union not easily effected. In all probability, it could never have been accomplished except by those peculiar circumstances which gradually prepared and at last reconciled the two divergent and conflicting nationalities. The cost of the preparation had been immense. To the last there were those in the smaller realm who stoutly resisted what seemed an unnatural connection. They felt that the knell of Scotland's glory had sounded. The union, however, once effected, soon demonstrated the wisdom of its policy. The success of it was its magnificent vindication. The' problem was plain enough when the overruling providence of God had once solved it by showing how much better it was for two powerful races shut up on a narrow island, with no natural boundary between them, to dwell in the close and peaceful bonds of a great national compact than to be for ever wasting each other's 2 strength by interminable bloody wars. Under such circumstances the good of the one was the highest good of the other, and whatever glory either could have attained alone was far more than doubled by the higher glory of one great united nation. Probably no union in all history has proved more beneficial to the contracting parties or become more close and indissoluble.

Chapter III. Her Great Historic Names

NOT a little of the heroic and romantic mingles in the long story of Scotland's struggle for civil and religious liberty, giving rise to an illustrious roll known as the " Scottish chiefs " and the " Scottish worthies." Who are best entitled to stand as the representative heroes of that history ? Unquestionably, the three greatest names are those of William Wallace, Robert Bruce and John Knox — Bruce, the noblest of her warriorkings ; Wallace, the most renowned of her people and gentry ; and Knox, the grandest champion of her Reformed Church.

There are two notable epochs in the Scottish history, each having all the elements of a magnificent picture. One of these belongs to the sixteenth century, with Knox and Queen Mary in the foreground ; the other carries us back to the days of Bruce and Wallace and the great house of Douglas, at the close of the thirteenth and the opening of the fourteenth century. A stern and lofty grandeur gathers around the brow of Knox. It is not surprising that Carlyle in his

Hero-Worship sets up the great Reformer as a veritable king of men, the highest type and embodiment of a nation, a man created for the times, the foster-child of divine Providence, " one of the few immortal names that were not born to die."

" John Knox," says Carlyle, " is the one Scotsman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt." " The life of Knox," says one of our own countrymen, Prof. Samuel J. Wilson, " was one of the grandest ever lived on this footstool of God. He has been dead these three hundred years. During all this time history has been busy with his life and character. These have been fiercely assailed and eloquently defended. For three centuries his work has been speaking for him with ever-increasing volume of meaning and eloquence. He needs no other monument. He needs no other apology." John Knox at St. Andrews, or in his pulpit of St. Giles at Edinburgh, or summoned into the presence of Mary Stuart at Holyrood Palace, is a figure as grand as Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms. When standing before the imperious young queen for the fifth time, alike unawed by her threats and unmoved by her tears, and confronted with angry, indignant questions, " Who are you in this commonwealth, and what have you to do with my marriage ?" what could exceed the calm dignity and heroism of the Reformer's reply? " I am a subject born within the same,

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madam; and, albeit I am neither earl, lord nor baron within it, yet has God made me, how abject soever I am in your eyes, a profitable member within the same. Yea, madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it doth to any of the nobility."

It was not in vain that during the dark period of ten years' civil strife the voice of Knox had been heard ringing like a clarion in St. Giles's pulpit at Edinburgh, and that his words had been echoed in all the pulpits of the land. " His was the voice," says Professor Wilson, " that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a freeman, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. During the trying vicissitudes of civil war, Knox was the one pillar of strength upon which Scotland leaned with her whole weight. Wise in counsel, utterly fearless in action, mighty in the resistless torrents of his eloquence, the nation turned to him instinctively as its God-given leader. With a price upon his head, with hired assassins waylaying his path, ever at the post of duty and of danger, careless of his own life, thinking only of his dear Scotland in the darkest extremities of perilous times, waking ,the expiring courage of heroes with the trumpet-peals of his eloquence, — he fought the good fight bravely through until peace was proclaimed, popery was abolished by act of Parliament, and a Confession prepared principally by himself was adopted. There never was a nobler fight, or one that was more signal in its achievements."

The names of Sir William Wallace and King Robert Bruce, from the earlier period of Scottish history in the close of the thirteenth and opening of the fourteenth century, have been the loved themes of the poet, the historian, the orator and the statesman through all the succeeding ages. They have been the laurel-crowned heroes not only of their own country, but in all lands where the love of freedom has burned brightly in the hearts of the people. They have been the synonyms for natural independence, manly courage, heroic daring and perseverance unto death. They are the very watchwords of liberty for every oppressed race and nation, in every battle of the weak against the strong, of the right against the wrong. Though one of them, Wallace, after winning one great battle, was crushed by treachery and superior numbers in a second, and at last shamefully executed as a traitor, his name has yet come down through history as one of the honored and immortal names that can never perish. Bruce a few years later took up the same battle of his country, and after almost unparalleled disasters and the most heroic energy was at last crowned with victory in the memorable battle of Bannockburn. He lived to show by one great example

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how freedom's cause may at last be won. If little Scotland had done no more than produce her Wallace and her Bruce, she would thereby have gained the lasting gratitude and admiration of the world, and sent down an influence and a prestige to be felt as long as independence and liberty are appreciated among men.

In this connection must be briefly mentioned two other illustrious names on the roll of Scotland's canonized heroes. They stand as the pioneers and the representatives of her noble army of Christian champions in the cause of truth. These are Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart, the precursors of the great Reformation — the first a young man of twenty-three with the blood of earls and dukes in his veins and a brilliant future opening before him ; the other, the learned and eloquent evangelist whose voice rang like a trumpet over Scotland, and whose powerful preaching, whether in churches or in the open air, drew crowds of admiring people to hear him. By order of the papal hierarchy each was arrested, condemned and burned at the stake before the doors of the University of St. Andrews, which in better times they might have adorned by their learning and their eloquence. The worthy predecessors of Knox, and endued with his heroic spirit, they bravely met the issue, and nobly died for the rights of conscience and the word of God. From their ashes was kindled the flame of reformation that soon spread over all Scotland and prepared the way for the work of Knox. In them, truly, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the Church. Cardinal Beaton sought to cover their names with infamy and to extinguish their influence for ever. All generations have delighted to do them honor. The influence of their example has gone out over all the earth. It has become an inspiration of zeal and courage to the champions of truth and liberty in every civilized land. It is one of Scotland's precious contributions to the world's history.

While to the thoughtful student all the elements of moral sublimity will ever gather thickest around the later period, with Knox as its pioneer and leader, still in the popular estimation probably the highest heroic interest of the Scottish history culminates, in the earlier period, around the names of Wallace and Bruce. The men of all free and civilized nations, the very boys and girls at school to the end of time, will read and be thrilled by that story. It was the era of the troubadour and the tournament, when Europe rang with the fame of the crusader and Christendom bowed at the mention of the cross. It was the noonday of romance and chivalry — the apotheosis of manly honor, of womanly beauty, of gallant prowess, of martial glory. There were indeed giants on earth in those days, and Scotland's heroes were among them.

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With all its glory, it was an age of iron, an age of blood. It is not the purpose of this sketch to dwell on its great characters or its cruel conflicts ; it is enough now simply to point out influences and results. Was all that gallant blood, of both the earlier and the later period, shed in vain? Assuredly not. It was the price of independence, of self-government, of civil and religious liberty. Costly as was the sacrifice, long and terrible as was the conflict, it was not too dear a cost at which to purchase such a boon. When it was won, it was not won for Scotland alone, but for posterity, for mankind. All that Scotland is to-day, all that she holds precious in the arts of peaceful industry and in the possession of civil and religious freedom, she owes, under God, to her own deathless struggle for independence, renewed from century to century until it had reddened her fields with blood and filled her land with ruins and monuments. No portion of the earth's surface is perhaps more thickly strewn with the ashes of martyred heroes and the bones of the slaughtered champions of truth and right. The seed was long sowing, but the harvest has been abundant and glorious. Victoria reigns to-day as truly Scotland's queen as she is England's — fifty-fourth sovereign of the Scottish royal line from Kenneth MacAlpine, and fifty-first of th English from Alfred the Great.

It has been finely said that a land without ruins is a land without memories, and a land without memories is a land without liberty. " The land that wears a laurel crown may be fair to look upon, but twine a few sad cypressleaves around the brow of some bleak and barren land (it may be dark and lonely as Montenegro) and it becomes lovely in its coronet of sorrow. It wins the sympathies of the heart and of history. Crowns of roses fade; crowns of thorns endure. Calvaries and crosses take deepest hold of humanity."

" Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow."

Byron's strong line might be taken as the text and the key to a large portion of the Scottish history. In the struggle for national independence and constitutional liberty the soil of Scotland was made not only a battlefield, but a crowded cemetery. No equal portion of the earth's surface could better illustrate the sentiment of a living American bard :

" Give me a land where the ruins are spread, And the living tread light on the hearts of the dead; Ay, give me a land that is blest by the dust And bright with the deeds of the down-trodden just. I honor the land that hath legend and lays Enshrining the memory of long-vanished days; I honor the land that hath story and song To tell of the strife of the right with the wrong. Yes, give me the land with a grave in each spot, And names in the graves that shall not be forgot : There's a grandeur in graves, there's a glory in gloom,

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For out of the gloom future brightness is born,

And after the night looms the sunrise of morn ;

And the graves of the dead, with the grass overgrown,

May yet form the footstool of Liberty's throne,

And each single wreck in the warpath of might

Shall yet be a rock in the temple of Right."

Every part of Scotland is crowded with such memorials of the past — venerable ruins where " the living tread light on the hearts of the dead," battlefields that " tell of the strife of the right with the wrong," sacred enclosures " with a grave in every spot " and " names in the graves that shall not be forgot." Most of all do these grand monuments of the past cluster around Edinburgh, the unique and classic capital enthroned among crags where the new and the old so strangely meet. There a thousand associations of the past chain the antiquarian, a thousand beauties of the present make it to the eye of the artist the most picturesque city in Europe,