The Scottish Protestant Churches have manifested increasing alarm for several years over what has become known as the “Irish Invasion” of Scotland. There is no dispute as to the facts. The Irish population is rapidly increasing; the native Scottish population is rapidly declining. The former is mainly confined to the big industrial centres; the latter is leaving the cities, but to a still greater extent is leaving the countryside. The position is that, owing to Irish, and other alien immigration, our urban congestion is not being relieved by the continual drain of emigration. All that is happening is that a certain proportion of Scottish people is being replaced there annually by an equivalent of un-Scottish people. While this is happening in the towns, which, despite all the emigration, continue to show 50 per cent. more unemployment than in England, our rural areas are being steadily depopulated of their irreplaceable native peasantry—and nobody is taking their place. The seriousness of the matter on either count cannot be exaggerated. But the vital thing is not the influx of Irish and other aliens, but the exodus of Scots. It is due to our present economic system—to the condition of Scottish industries on the one hand which renders them incapable of paying adequate wages to Scottish employees and ready, therefore, to supplant them with cheaper Irish labour, and, on the other hand, to the lack of a progressive and native agricultural policy. The causes are political and economic, and if the consequences have religious and social bearings, these should not lead to any misconception as to the causes and any confusion as to how these can, and should be, dealt with. Sectarian trouble, for example, over a purely economic question, is not likely to help matters. This is the danger some of the Scottish Protestant Ministers are running. Their failure to penetrate to the real causes is blinding them to the only solution. That solution is a re-orientation of Scottish affairs on such a basis that Scottish industries and interests would not be systematically sacrificed to English, but developed in accordance with the particular requirements of Scotland, as they could be developed if Scotland were not compelled to pay, as it is under the present system, upwards of £120,000,000 per annum to the Imperial Exchequer, out of which it receives back only some £30,000,000. If the Scottish contribution were equitably applied, many millions a year would become available for Scottish commercial and industrial developments, and not only could the flow of Scottish emigration overseas be arrested, but a stream back to Scotland would speedily set in if Scotland could offer its exiled people anything like the conditions they are obtaining in the colonies. They did not want to emigrate. Economic conditions forced them. Only economic conditions can bring them back. This will never happen so long as a system is applied