What prevents the development of well-informed and positive policies in regard to such problems as that of the Scottish Highlands? Col. John Buchan, M.P., expressed the opinion in a letter to the present writer that “it is impossible to make up one’s mind on the Scottish Home Rule question—the necessary facts, and figures are not available.” Why are they not available? In certain directions these have been systematically refused by Government Departments—or purposely embodied along with the English in such a way that comparisons between the two countries cannot be instituted. In other directions the refusal of financial facilitation, as Mr William Graham, M.P., has pointed out, has resulted in the creation of a tremendous leeway in the economic and social documentation of Scotland, so that in practically every direction laborious independent research is necessary to get at the facts and figures. They are nowhere readily available. The vested interests of the Scottish daily papers are all part and parcel of the sequelæ of the Union. They all “make a show” of Scottishness by dealing in windy and suitably contradictory generalizations with Scottish topics—but they all toe the secret line. Letters sent in by readers are carefully censored. Opinions may be expressed (preferably anti-nationalist, or, better still, merely sentimentally nationalist), but facts and figures are not permitted—or, at all events, only isolated ones. Nothing can get published that attempts to relate facts and figures in regard to Scottish subjects to each other, and thus, to a national policy of any kind. There is not a single paper that dare publish a series of articles dealing thoroughly and systematically either with the case for Scottish Home Rule or with any of the major social or economic problems of Scotland. Nor dare they relax their vigilance in respect of the utterance of Scottish M.P.s in Parliament. Only so much is allowed “through”; the rest must be kept back in the sieve. What does appear must appear so fragmentarily and disjointedly—and be so offset by the facetiousness and belittlement of leaders and tittle-tattle paragraphs—that it cannot conduce to the creation of any “well-informed and positive policy.” What hidden interests behind the newspapers dictate this corruption of their natural functions and insist upon a journalism to bamboozle rather than educate the public—a journalism to make “confusion worse confounded” rather than to clarify national issues in a systematic and rational fashion? What is the meaning of the whole position and policy that is, superficially, so determinedly unintelligible?