Do not the intolerable conditions to which it has been reduced, the unparalleled anomalies in its “national” finance, suggest that a flanking movement against the Powers of Finance may be best achieved through it. This is “the place where the spring of action will play”—where alone a counterforce to that which is not only making for centralization in all directions and superannuating such agencies of differentiation as Scots and Gaelic, but would eliminate religion by completely mechanizing the masses of mankind and make Socialism the last and worst stage in capitalism—the Servile State—rather than the first in a new and nobler order, can be generated. Here is the “comprehensive-enough agency”—“the nation-size principle”—the meeting ground of Scottish Nationalists, Catholics and Socialists, those diverse elements upon whose recognition of their interdependence, their need to complement and moderate each other, depends not only the realizable proportion of the ideals of each but a Scottish Renaissance of international consequence. Let us not fight with enemies—England, commercial Calvinism, “Progress,” thought-hating democracy—which are merely the agents of the foe that is really worthy of our steel, the cause that lies behind them all; but, in concentrating on the latter, remember that every other nation has suffered in like fashion to some degree from its operations, and make common cause with the elements in all these other countries which are seeking to overcome it. It is noteworthy that banking and national interests in Scotland are far more conspicuously divorced from each other than in most countries. There is less “cover” here than at the centre. Leading Scottish bankers do not discourse, like their English brethren, on current topics; they confine themselves to the business in hand. Mr McKenna and the like may create a diversion by pretending to let, not the cat, but one or two of its meows out of the bag occasionally, but in Scotland the public is too docile even to need “circuses.” The amalgamation of the Scottish banks with the English, along with such subsidiary developments or sequelæ of the same policy, as the amalgamation of the railways, and the English control of Scottish newspapers, represents one side of that picture of which the inevitable obverse is the fact that the collective area of deer forests (1,709,892 acres in 1883) is now 3,599,744 acres; seventeen Scottish counties to-day have a population less than it was fifty years ago, eleven have less than in 1821, and five less than in 1801; and of the remaining population of the country more than 45 per cent. (over two million people) live more than two in a room!