It is utterly irrational to find all the real practical issues of a nation “outwith the sphere of practical politics” and that sphere monopolized by professional-politician issues, few of which have the most indirect bearing upon national realities. It is utterly irrational to find a whole electorate bemused and misled (for all practical purposes) by such an abracadabra. That is the position of Scotland to-day. All the Scottish papers aver that the demand for Scottish nationalism is made by “a handful of fanatics,” and has no real weight of “public opinion” behind it—but what is “public opinion,” and how far is it reflected by a Press which, in a country which has always been overwhelmingly radical and republican, and where to-day a third of the entire electorate vote Socialist, is solidly sycophantic and anti-socialist? _The Glasgow Herald_, in a recent leader, observed that there was no need for street-corner oratory in these days of a great free Press whose columns are open for the expression of all manner of opinion, and its editor, Sir Robert Bruce, is frequently to be heard dilating on the high status and professional integrity of the journalist to-day. Yet it is simple fact that there is no free Press and that journalists hold their jobs by opportunism and cannot afford to “own their own souls.” A man with “ideas of his own” is of no use in a modern newspaper office. The vigilance of the Press censorship—the ubiquitous range and insidiousness of the policy behind it—is such that even _The Glasgow Herald_ does not, and cannot, permit signed correspondence on such subjects as Scottish music or drama, for example (let alone politics), if these go against the ideas of the vested interests concerned with these departments, not to speak of the veiled interests behind these vested interests which “hold all the strings in their hands.” Interplay of opinion is confined to opposing views within a certain range; but the essence of the matter all the time, so far as the ultimate interests are concerned, is “Heads I win, tails you lose.” It is this that makes a goblin of the vaunted Scottish hard-headedness and practicality—induces the amazing supineness of the successful protagonists of Scottish Devolution Measures when these are rejected by the English majority at Westminster—prevents any real Scottish issue emerging into the realm of “practical politics”—makes the systematic neglect of Scottish interests of all kinds a subject for stereotyped jokes in the Scottish Press (professedly favourable to “legitimate” nationalist aspirations—in China)—prevents different sections of the Scottish public realizing that their diverse grievances and difficulties spring from a common centre and denies them those publicist services which would effectively relate consequence to cause—and foists, not least upon Scotsmen themselves, that stock conception of the “canny Scot,” which is so belied by the actualities of our national