Part 8
Whiskey to breakfast, whiskey to dinner, whiskey to supper; whiskey when you meet a friend, whiskey over all business meetings whatsoever; whiskey before you go into the kirk, whiskey when you come out; whiskey when you are about to take a journey, whiskey all along the road, whiskey at the journey’s end; whiskey when you are well, whiskey if you be sick, whiskey almost as soon as you are born, whiskey the last thing before you die—that is Scotland. There is a cock-and-bull tale to the effect that all the finest clarets go to Leith and are drunk in Edinburgh. Practically, there is no really good claret in all Scotland, unless it be at the hotels which have been built for the reception of English and American tourists, and the Scot to the manner born would not give you a “thank you” for the best claret in the world. “Go bring me a pint of wine and bring it in a silver tassy” was a mere piece of swagger on the part of the bard. Wine is not drunk in Scotland; the Scotchman can get no “forrader” with it, and as for drinking it out of a silver tassy, there are not more than three silver tassies in the country. Whiskey, and that of the crudest and most shuddering quality is undoubtedly the Scotchman’s peculiar vanity. The amount that he can consume without turning a hair is quite appalling. I have seen a Scotchman drink three bottles of Glenlivet on a railway journey from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and when he got out at Edinburgh he strutted doucely to the refreshment bar and demanded further whiskey. In London, and particularly in Fleet Street, his feats in this connection are notorious. In the more central quarters of London there are a number of hostelries which are almost wholly devoted to Scottish requirements in the way of ardent liquors. Under some Scotch name, such as the Scotch Stores, the Clachan, the Highland Laddie, and so forth, these places flourish and the proprietors of them wax fat. Here, any morning in the week, you will find brither Scots assembled, elbow on counter, indulging in the whiskey which delights their souls. All day there is plenty of company, plenty of Doric, plenty of discussion on politics and the questions of the hour, but more than all, a steady flow of whiskey. And by eleven P.M. or thereabouts the company begins to exhibit a tendency to song. And at closing time it staggers forth singing _Scots Wha Hae_ and _My Ain Kind Dearie O_ in various pathetic keys. _Scots Wha Hae_ is a poor song to sing in the circumstances, and as for _My Ain Kind Dearie O_, she probably fumes at home and is not in the least kind in her welcoming of her whiskeyful lord. It is certain that the number of persons in Fleet Street employed upon the press either in literary capacities or as advertisement canvassers or printers is very considerable, and among the lower grades of them, the drinking of whiskey appears to be considered a part of their duty to themselves and to mankind at large. At the same time it is only fair to say that a drunken Scotchman is not by any means a common spectacle, the reason being that the Scot is so inured to the consumption of whiskey from his youth up, that he can take almost any quantity without becoming drunk about the legs. Drink, however, he must and will have, and both at home and abroad he makes a point of getting as much of it as his means will allow. In Scotland it is quite general for men and women alike to drink whiskey raw and to take the water afterwards. This is done at every meal, and if you call upon a Scotch household at any hour of the day you will be at once offered a four-or five-finger dose of the national drink. To refuse it is to be set down for an evilly-disposed person. Burns the Almighty approved of whiskey drinking; with him it was the symbol of good-fellowship, and he is quoted to you continually as the justification of all excesses.
We are na drunk, we’re no’ that drunk But just a drappie in our ee,
is the great retort used by Scotchmen if one suggests that they have had enough or too much.
It is to the Scot’s amazing capacity for the consumption of spirit that one may fairly attribute some of his minor defects. Dourness, of which every Scotchman possesses a fair share, and of which he is invariably more or less proud, has always struck me as being in a great measure the outcome of too much whiskey overnight. It is not till he is properly exhilarated with drink that a Scot can unbend himself in the smallest degree. Once primed, he does his best to prove himself an excellent and generous fellow by becoming as uproarious as the host of the tavern in which he is drinking will allow him to be. But next morning, when the whiskey is out of him, he is a very sad and sober man indeed. Then it is that he passes for “dour.” You talk with him and get for answers grunts: he cannot smile; he plods heavily away at whatever labour stands in front of him: he is glum, rude of tongue and dull of mind, and his brethren set it down for you to his “Scots dourness.”
His gift of steady drinking also accounts, in my opinion, for his general mediocrity. Whiskey may be a fine and healthy drink for persons who do not take enough of it; but to be braced up with it by day and to swim in it by night is calculated to have a detrimental effect even on the bright intellects that come out of Scotland. I have not the smallest desire to suggest that there are not plenty of hard drinkers whose blood is more or less purely English, yet somehow there is no kind of man in the world who makes the drinking of furious spirit a _cultus_ and a boast in the way that the Scotchman does. To be fou’ or as he would put it, to have a drappie in his eye, is the Scotchman’s notion of bigness and freedom and manly independence. He is a ranter and a roarer in his cups, and on the whole much more distressing to meet drunk than sober, which is saying a great deal.
XIII
THE SCOT AS CRIMINAL
Burns, like every other Scotchman that has trailed a pen, did not fail to help along the Scottish advertisement with a suitable contribution. He wrote _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, and thereby did a great thing for Scotland, setting up a picture of Scottish home life and piety which the generations seem to regard as authentic. We have all been taught to admire the moral excellences of that cottar, not to mention the moral excellences of his wife and children:
With joy unfeigned brothers and sisters meet, And each for others’ welfare kindly spiers; The social hours swift winged, unnotic’d fleet, Each tells the unco’s that he see or hears. The parents partial eye their hopeful years, Anticipation forward prints the view; The mother, wi’ her needle and her shears, Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new, The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due.
Their masters’ and their mistresses’ command The younkers a’ are warned to obey. And mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand, And ne’er tho’ out of sight to jauk or play— And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway. And mind your duty, duly morn and night, Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray, Implore his counsel and assisting might, They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.
All of which is very fine, and, with much more to the like effect, has helped the Scotch peasant into an odour of sanctity which on the whole does not appear to be quite his element. Indeed, so far from conducting his life in the manner suggested by _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, the average Scot of the lower orders appears to base himself on the more scandalous portion of Burns’s writing.
According to the latest returns, the population of Scotland is 4,472,000. In the year 1900, which is the latest year for which statistics are available, a matter of 180,000 persons were charged with criminal offences in Scotland. So that out of every twenty-five Scotchmen in Scotland one is either a convicted criminal or a person who has been charged with a criminal offence. From the official Buff-book dealing with the subject I take the following:
“The criminal returns for 1900 show an increase over those for the previous year under all the important classes into which crime and offences are grouped, the number of persons charged has risen to close upon 180,000, and if we compare this with the last published English tables for the year 1899, we shall find, for equal numbers of population, Scotland has over three charges for every two in England.
“Furthermore, imprisonments in Scotland continue to be proportionately much higher than in England, and for every three committals in England there are seven in Scotland. The increase in criminal offences during 1900 is distributed under the following heads”:
Culpable homicide 28 Assaults of husbands on wives 690 Cruel and unnatural treatment of children 242 Housebreaking of all kinds 190 Theft 1,916 Malicious mischief 986 Betting games and lotteries 96 Breach of the peace, etc. 519 Cruelty to animals 145 Offences in relation to dogs 148 Drunkenness 5,785 Offences against Elementary Education Acts 397 Army deserters 1,207 Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regulations 9,570 Prostitution 613 Bicycling, etc, offences 367 Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road Act offences 2,664 Public Health Act offences 162 Lodging without consent of owner under Vagrancy Acts 425 ------ 26,150
It will thus be seen that theft and drunkenness bear the gree among Scotch crimes, while the large number of offences against police acts, by-laws, and regulations tends to show that the Scot is not a good citizen. The mere statistics as to crime, however, do not give one anything like an adequate idea of the general depravity of the Scotch character. To understand it properly we must add to the criminal returns the illegitimacy returns.
From Dr. Albert Leffingwell’s[16] book on illegitimacy I take the following passage:
“In 1881 the census of Scotland showed that there were then living in that portion of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women (that is to say, spinsters and widows) between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. During the ten years 1878-87 there were born in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate children, or an annual average of twenty-one to each thousand unmarried females at this specified age. In England and Wales the corresponding number of the unmarried females was 3,046,431, and the number of illegitimate births during the same period was 426,184, or fourteen to each thousand of the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number of unmarried women at this age was a third larger than in Scotland, or 731,767. Yet to each thousand of these were born every year less than five illegitimate children during a ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again we are perplexed with the problem why Scotia and Hibernia should present such widely different contrasts. Every year in Scotland there are _five times the proportion_ of bastards that see the light in Ireland!”
Dr. Leffingwell’s perplexity is the perplexity of the scientific person. That Burns should have anything to do with illegitimacy of Scotia would probably seem ridiculous to the scientific mind, but I believe that Burns, and the spirit of loose living for which he stands, have been to no little extent responsible for bringing Scotland to the discreditable and degrading pass indicated by Dr. Leffingwell’s figures.
In Ireland the rate of illegitimacy is 4.4, in Scotland, 21.5 to each thousand unmarried women. Now, the poet who stands in the same relation to the Irish people as Burns does to the Scotch is Thomas Moore. He has given Ireland quite as considerable a body of songs as Burns has given to Scotland. He is just as essentially Irish as Burns is Scotch; but compare the tone of the two men. One of them gives you _The lass who made the bed to me_, the other, _Rich and rare were the gems she wore_. In reading Burns you find that quite two thirds of what he has written is marred by unpleasant and libidinous suggestion, but there is not a line of Moore which would not pass muster in a ladies’ school. To the rantin’ roarin’ Billies of Scotland the difference may form material for a sneer, but in the long run, clearly, the advantage is with the women of Ireland. If Scotland wishes to get rid of her drunkenness and to lessen the crime which arises out of it, and if she wishes to bring herself into line with the ordinary standards of decency, she will, I am afraid, have to put a little less trust in that mighty performer before the Flesh—Robert Burns.
XIV
THE SCOT BY ADOPTION
I have been told that there are two kinds of Scotchmen, and that it would be a mistake to confound them, or to suggest that they have any characteristics in common. One kind, and the best kind, I am assured, is the Highlander. The other—and the more disreputable kind—is the Scotchman of the Lowlands. I have met both sorts, and I have not been able to discover that there is much to choose between them. For all practical purposes the blood is identical. It may at one time have been of two distinct strains, but these appear to have become in a great measure fused, and the blend is not beautiful. I think it was Dr. Cunninghame Graham who said of a certain Scotch peddler that he looked like a cross between a low-class Indian and an ourang-outang that had somehow got itself baptised. This, no doubt, is a little severe. But a Scotchman does certainly make one feel that underneath his unsatisfactory and obviously imperfect civilisation the hairy simian sits and grins. Rouse him, thwart him, disappoint him, rally him, and suddenly your cross-eyed, sandy-haired, bandy-legged, but withal sleek, smug, moralising man suddenly “bleezes,” and you perceive in him the ten thousand devils of an ancient and arboreal barbarity. Whether he be Highlander or Lowlander or mongrel, as he mostly is, it is just the same. He is Scotch and compounded for the most part of savage. Like the converted Kroo-boy, he may at any time revert into his immemorial primalism and you can never be sure of him. Whether he hail from the Isles or from the Lothians, the Scot is just the Scot, and there is nothing more to be said for him.
There is, however, a kind of Scot who, while not of Scotch blood, has adopted the manners and habits of Caledonia, and is rather flattered if you take him for a true-born Scotchman. This type of creature usually owes his retrogression to the fact that he has married a Scotch wife. Of Scotchwomen as a body, I do not wish to say anything that will be considered ungallant. If one passes over their abnormal capacity for thrift, I suppose they are pretty much the same as other women. So far as I am aware I have not met more than a dozen Scotchwomen in my life. Two of them I have known intimately, and I have always thanked my stars that I was not married to either of them. But to return to our Scotchman by adoption. Usually, as I say, he is married to a Scotchwoman. Before you arrive at a knowledge of this circumstance, you are inclined to wonder what is the matter with him. His style and proclivities have induced you to set him down for a Scotchman, yet you find that his Doric is bad, that he eats his porridge with sugar and takes his whiskey with soda, and that he was born in Gloucestershire. Also, he tells you frankly that his parents were not Scotch, and he adds, with a look of supreme satisfaction, “but my wife is.” And straightway he plunges into tender reminiscences of the days of his courtship, touches modestly upon the wealth and importance of his wife’s relations, hints at the fearful expense to which he was put by his many journeys North when he went a-wooing, and gurgles with a sickly smile that it was worth the trouble, and that he does not know “what he would do without her.” All of which is mightily interesting. If you pursue your investigations further, you will find that the man is perhaps a little more to pity than to blame. He has been compelled to become as Scotch as he knows how, willy-nilly. At the head of his table sits the daughter of Scotia—ruddy, chapped, and sharp of tongue; she looks down on things English, her husband included; her children are taught to remember that their grandfather is a provost and magnificent in the jute line; she keeps her house in the Scotch manner, her servants are Scotch, her household linens are Scotch, her beef is Scotch, and her whiskey is Scotch; her little boys wear tartan; tripe is the great dish for supper, and her husband must eat oatmeal to the verge of scrofula. Abroad, too, this man must be as Scotch as the best of them. In his place of business, Scotchmen _protégés_ of his wife’s relations are the only ware: he loathes them, and they laugh at him behind his back, but he has to put up with them. On Saturdays they instruct him in the mysteries of “gowf”; on Mondays they tell one another what a “damned foozler” he is. His holidays are always spent in the Western Highlands; he is everlastingly seeing his wife off to Aberdeen; he banks at the Bank of Scotland; he smokes the tobacco which has been so ably pushed into fame by Dr. J. M. Barrie; he believes that the Glasgow bailies know what they are about; his money, which has been scraped together on the Scotch principle, is doucely put away in Scotch ventures; and altogether Scotland does very well out of him. The fact that he is a mean little man does not worry him. The practice and view of life which the lady of his affections has forced upon him is bringing him a due share of this world’s gear, and in that fact he takes consolation for his attenuated honesty, his lost manhood, and his lost nationality. This is one side of the picture and the brightest.
On the other side it were well for us not to look too closely. The Englishman who has been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not always succeed in profiting by the worldly wisdom with which his spouse would imbue him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotchwoman who cannot report to her kindred in Scotland that her husband is “getting on” feels that she has been robbed of the prime joy of existence. Her contempt for the man who cannot win and grip siller eats into her soul, until she has no other sentiment left. Bit by bit she develops into a scold and a curtain-lecturer; the man who found her so fair by the Birks of Aberfeldey becomes a furtive wanderer from her side, and it all ends in too much whiskey, recrimination, and execration. I know an Englishman of parts who has never earned enough money to be under the necessity of paying income tax. He is a man of small stature and limp, and he has a great fear in his eyes. He is one of those men who might have done things and have omitted to do them. The gossip about him is that he is badly married. Once I saw his wife. She was a big, raw-boned Scotchwoman, with a heavy accent on her. It was New Year’s Eve, and she had evidently been “tasting.” At sight of me, out of the bigness of her Scotch hospitality, she proposed a “nep,” and half filled three glasses from a stone bottle. Then, with hand on hip, glass uplifted, and a blaze on her face, she cried: “Here’s tae us and to hell with the English.” We drank the toast in something of a silence. Later, when I was about to leave, my limp friend would have accompanied me to the door. But the mistress of his heart would have none of it. “Ye’ll awa’,” she said, then, “to yer bed; yer friend is no’ that fou but he can find his ain way oot.” So that we shook hands and parted on the stair. The man had had twenty years of it. I understand him.
The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and speaking with an accent for the mere sake of it is scarcely worth notice. But there are such people even outside Colney Hatch. What they see in the Scotch to admire to the point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of me make out. The garb of old Gaul is, no doubt, very fetching from the point of view of the weak-minded, but of its effeminacy there can be no doubt. Really, it is a costume for small and pretty boys who are too young to be breeched. In view of its associations and of its innate childishness,—not to say immodesty,—it is a great pity that any Englishman should go out of his way to wear it.
XV
THE SCOT AND ENGLAND
Although the political relations between Scotland and England would seem to have been of the smoothest since the Act of Union, and in spite of the fact that on the whole the merging of the two peoples under one Government has tended hugely to the benefit of Scotland, it is the Scotch fashion to lament the Union with groans and to insist that 1707 was a black year for Scotchmen. I believe that were it not for the circumstance that Scotland cannot produce capable men even in the way of agitators we should soon have at St. Stephen’s a Scotch party which would be just as troublesome and just as noisy and truculent as is the Irish party. I believe, too, that within twelve months’ time as big a demand for Home Rule and as much disquiet and rebellion could be got up in Scotland as have ever existed in Ireland. Fortunately, however, the Scotch possess neither the requisite agitators nor the requisite pluck to indulge in serious demonstrations against the Imperial Government. So that they have to content themselves with futile grumbling and petty acts of disloyalty. The Scot has always been more or less of a fine hand at a treason. Out of Scotland has come the only treasonable organisation which England can boast of at the present day. I refer, of course, to that absurd group of persons who once a year decorate the statue of Charles I. at Whitehall with cheap wreaths, and circulate leaflets which profess to prove that the reigning monarch in these realms is a usurper, and that our only true monarch is a woman by the name of Mary, who lives somewhere on the Continent. In any country but England these gentry would be laid by the heels; though the mere fact that they are Scotch renders them quite ineffective. We can afford to smile at them. All the same, we must remember that if they could make trouble they would. Even in the matter of the King’s Coronation the Scotch have managed to give us the usual display of stupid insolence. Writing to his paper in May last, the Scottish correspondent of the _Times_ said: