Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sentiment strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs—a failure inconsistent alike with our traditional love of country and reputation for practicality. The reason probably lies in the fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complexity of our national life. For it must be recognized that the absence of Scottish nationalism is, paradoxically enough, a form of Scottish self-determination. If that self-determination, which, in the opinion of many of us, has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass, is to be induced to take a different form and express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading programme must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long ensured the opposite process. Scottish opinion is anachronism-proof in matters of this kind. The tendency inherent in the Union, to assimilate Scotland to England, and ultimately to provincialize the former—the stage which has been so unexpectedly but unmistakably arrested at the eleventh hour—has, as a matter of fact, not yet been effectively countered by the emergence of any principle demanding a reversed tendency. That is why, despite the persistence in Scotland of an entirely different psychology, the desire to retain and develop distinctive traditions in arts and affairs, and the fairly general recognition that the political, economic and social consequences of the Union have never been by any means wholly favourable to Scottish interests and have latterly, in many ways, become decreasingly so to a very alarming degree, there has nevertheless been at most little more than a passive resistance to complete assimilation masked by an external acquiescence. This is because Home Rule has been conceived for the most part, even by its advocates, merely as a measure of devolution—a continuance of substantially the same thing as prevails at Westminster; not something fundamentally different and answering to the unexpressed needs of the Scottish spirit. It is this passive resistance which accounts, for example, for the comparative paucity and poverty of distinctively Scottish literature since the Union. Only that fringe of the Scottish genius amenable to Anglicization has continued to find expression; the rest has, practically, “held its tongue,” and, to a large extent, its powers of expression have atrophied. A similar phenomenon manifests itself in our schools. Many teachers tell me that the children’s abilities to express themselves, and, behind that, to think, are largely suppressed by official insistence upon the use of “correct English.” They actually think, and could express themselves a great deal more readily and effectively, in dialect.