There is a time-factor in all these things. The discoveries which have recently revolutionized physical science are due to a strain of “heresy” in mathematics, long ridiculed and sterile, but now come to its own as the medium of stupendous discoveries the heretics themselves never anticipated in their wildest dreams. The position in regard to Scottish Nationalism to-day is not dissimilar. A form of Scottish Home Rule would probably ultimately have been granted, if for no other reason than the congestion of business at Westminster—a matter of mere administrative convenience; and the present attempt to destroy the last vestiges of Scottish control of Scottish affairs by the wholesale transference of Departments to London is probably due to the realization that this goal, which was almost within grasp, is unaccountably receding. It would have made for greater efficiency, and, temporarily, for economy—but it would not have been utilizable for the deeper purposes I have indicated. On the contrary it would have represented the last step in the assimilation of Scotland to England. Scottish Home Rule Societies in the past have sought little more; and have encountered, in Scotland, the overwhelming objection to a “glorified County Council.” The deep intuitions of the people were right. The time had not come. All the bills hitherto promoted to give Scotland this or that measure of self-government have been inadequate means to the ends in reserve. Has the time come now? Unlike any of its predecessors the latest Draft Bill is “nation-size” and in significant alignment, if only in the steepening of its demands, with those profounder stirrings of the national consciousness to which “mere politics” are comparatively irrelevant, although in the last analysis they may be dependent upon them, as the big things in life often are upon the little. The Bill as an end in itself would still be of little consequence perhaps; but as a means to steadily emerging ends which cannot yet be clearly defined, but which it is obviously anticipating and likely to facilitate, it is on a different plane. And its promoters cannot realize too clearly that, as Charles Maurras has said, “The man of action is but a workman whose art consists in taking advantage of the lucky chances. All politics come back to this art of lying in wait for the _combinazione_, the happy chance. A moment always comes when the problem of success is a question of insight, and reduces itself to a search for what our Ancients called _junctura rerum_, the place where the bony structure bends, though it is rigid elsewhere, the place where the spring of the action will play.” Success may be unexpectedly near, and stupendous in its sequelæ. V