Again, letters from Paris, or “Our Irish Letter,” etc., are familiar features of English newspapers. Whoever saw a “Scottish Letter”? Concern with Scottish interests of any kind has been so completely excluded from publicity, has been made so completely a case of “beating the air,” that the usual headlines following a “Scottish Night” at Westminster are “Absent Members—Empty Benches—During Discussion on Scottish Estimates,” while from the report it appears that the debate resolves itself into a potpourri of stale jokes. Scotland alone of all European countries that have ever been in anything like its position relatively to any other country, has failed to develop a Nationalist Movement capable of affecting the practical political situation in some measure or other. Why have the Scottish members of all parties who have supported the numerous successive Scottish Home Rule measures acquiesced so tamely in their defeat at the hands of the English majority? There must be more in this acquiescence than meets the eye. It represents an abrogation of themselves, for all effective purposes, as the political leaders of Scotland of which it is inconceivable that they should be guilty, unless—behind the ostensible position—they were cognizant of a power against which they were incapable of contending, a power so possessed of the monopoly of mass publicity that it could completely stultify them by its all-pervasive _suppressio veri, suggestio falsi_ the instant they went beyond a given line. Contrasting the pre-Union achievements and promise of Scottish arts and letters with the beggarly results since, it is not too much to assert that Scottish Nationality was sold for “a mess of pottage,” and that Scotland has since been paying the price by submitting to the diversion of her entire energies into purely materialistic channels—not, however, as the present condition of Scotland and Scottish industries shows, for its own benefit. For whose, then? That I shall attempt to indicate. But, first of all, it cannot be too strongly stressed that its social, commercial, and industrial conditions to-day afford strong _prima facie_ evidence that if, as is commonly contended, Scotland has owed a great deal materialistically (whatever it may have lost in other directions) to its Union with England, it has now wholly ceased to derive any such advantages; the boot, indeed, is on the other foot; and on that, as on other grounds, it is high time to reconsider the relationships between the two countries.