Scotchman

“ It is not too much to say that if you have a Scotchman in your place of business, you are, as a rule, all the weaker for it. If you go thoroughly into him you will find that his only quality is his capacity for plod; as against this he has many ugly traits—jealousy, over-reachingness, and greediness among them. Rarely, if ever, does he understand his business, and of initiative and originality he is, as a rule, devoid. ”

“ If nolt feet, haggis, tripe, and sheep’s head are not offal in Scotland, they are certainly reckoned in that category in England.
We shall return to Dr. Ross’s scarifier in a chapter on “The Bard.” Meanwhile, let us note that the best English writers have agreed that the Scotchman is, at best, not quite an angel of light. They have looked on him with the eye of calm perception, and they have found him seriously wanting. That he is a savage and a barbarian by blood, a freebooter [41] by heredity, a dullard, a braggart, and in short, a Scotchman, cannot be doubted. ”

“ A Scotchman is vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference. ”

“ A Scotchman, on the contrary, is never easy but when his favourite subject is started, treats it with unqualified breadth of accent, and seems assured that every one else must be as fond of talking of Scotland and Scotchmen as he is. ”

“ None but a Scotchman would—that pragmatical sort of personage, who thinks it a folly ever to have been young, and who instead of dallying with the frail past, bends his brows upon the future, and looks only to the mainchance. Forgive me, dear Dunster, if I have drawn a sketch of some of thy venial foibles, and delivered thee into the hands of these Cockneys of the North, who will fall upon thee and devour thee, like so many cannibals, without a grain of salt!
If familiarity in cities breeds contempt, ignorance in the country breeds aversion and dislike. ”

“ It is the Scotchman’s boast that the Scotchman has always figured portentously in the councils of the civilised nations. In France, in Germany, and even in unbeautiful Russia, Scotchmen have established themselves and at time and time risen to positions of considerable political power. ”

“ A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry; ”

“ If there were not many nations that rivalled the Scotch in the way they held together as a people, there were still fewer that could show such inward division into parties and camps. The individual's feeling of his public duty did not begin with the nation, but with the tribe, the clan, nay, the family.
Hence we find Scott, the true Scotchman, showing preference, as a ballad-writer, for the legends which treat of the exploits of his own ancestors or kin, and in his private life exhibiting strong family feeling. ”

“ There are not wanting signs that, in spite of the manner in which it has been hidden and bolstered up, the Scotchman’s real character is beginning to be properly understood. Nobody can say, with any show of truth, that the Scot is either loved or admired by the peoples with whom he comes in contact outside his own country. Indeed, I believe that throughout England there is a very strong anti-Scotch feeling. ”

“ Although a Scotchman himself, he was intimately acquainted with the sort of men he had under him, and he dealt with them and addressed their feelings in a way that was peculiar to himself and suited to them. ”

“ He must be for or against somebody. He must have a cause to fight for; a point to carry in argument. He is not an unit but an aggregate; he is not a link, but a chain. He belongs to the regiment. I should hardly call a Scotchman conceited, though there is often something that borders strongly on the appearance of it. He has (speaking in the lump) no personal or individual pretensions. He is not proud of himself, but of being a Scotchman. He has no existence or excellence except what he derives from some external accident, or shares with some body of men. ”

“ I never knew a Christian so confident of going to Paradise, or less eager to set out.
Why does the Scotchman succeed everywhere? Why, in Australia, New Zealand, and all the other British Colonies, do you find him landowner, director of companies, at the head of enterprises of all kinds? Again, why do you find in almost all the factories of Great Britain that the foreman is Scotch?
Ah! it is very simple.
Success is very rarely due to extraordinary circumstances, or to chance, as the social failures are fond of saying. ”

“ The Scotchman's is a feeling altogether different; it is at once a deep steady friendship, and a blind enthusiastic love. He is little ready to admit those merits in another land, in which his own is deficient; he undervalues them, if he cannot altogether deny their existence ”

“ England, too, has secured by it every public blessing which was before enjoyed by her, and has greatly augmented her strength. The martial spirit of the Scotch, their hardy bodies, their acute and vigorous minds, their industry, their activity, are now employed to the benefit of the whole island. He is now a bad Scotchman who is not a good Englishman, and he is a bad Englishman who is not a good Scotchman. ”

“ All in vain did Scotland produce Smollett, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, [Pg 6] in the eyes of the English, the Scotchman has remained the personification of slow-wittedness—a poor fellow incapable of making much beyond prayers and money, and the Londoner who has never travelled—the poor Cockney who still firmly believes that the French are feeble creatures, living on snails and frogs—this Londoner, the most stupid animal in the world (after the Paris badaud, perhaps) , goes about repeating to all who will listen to such nonsense:
"Dull and heavy as a Scotchman!" ”

“ Taking him all in all, the Scotch critic is a good deal of an anomaly. To criticise is scarcely the Scotchman’s forte, his chief gifts lying rather in the direction of admiration, particularly of admiration for whatever is Scotch. But we have amongst us (and I do not wish him other than a long and prosperous career) one Scotch critic—or, at any rate, a Scotchman who passes for a critic. I refer, need it be said, to Dr. William Archer. Dr. Archer is the dramatic critic of the World newspaper. Whenever I have looked into the World newspaper, I have found a page or so of Dr. ”

“ The railway king in Wisconsin is a Scotchman. I was not surprised to hear it. The iron king in Pennsylvania is a Scotchman, Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The oil king of Ohio is a Scotchman, Mr. Alexander Macdonald. The silver king of California is a Scotchman, Mr. Mackay. The dry-goods-store king of New York—he is dead now—was a Scotchman, Mr. Stewart. It is just the same in Canada, just the same in Australia, and all over the English-speaking world. The Scotch are successful everywhere, and the new countries offer them fields for their industry, their perseverance, and their shrewdness. ”

“ To be Scotch is to be anything. There is no man so narrow as a Scotchman. There is no man so broad as a Scotchman. There is no mind so versatile as a Scotch mind. At the same time only a Scotch mind is capable of clinging with bull-dog tenacity to one idea. A Scotch heart out of all, and through all, can be true as death. A Scotch heart—the same one—can be cunning and treacherous as false human hearts are made. To be English is to have limits; the Germans, [239] the French, the Russians—they have all some inevitable attributes to modify their genius. ”

“ I thought, in my innocence, that the English Sunday was not to be matched.
Delusion on my part.
How hope to give a description of the Scotch Sabbath? It is an undertaking that might frighten a far more clever pen than mine.
Happily, in this also, the Scotch anecdote comes to my rescue.
Here is one, to begin with, which will show once more how difficult it is to trip up a Scotchman. Nothing is sacred for him when he wants to get himself out of a difficulty. ”

“ The Scotchman replied that "the natives always make a point of imposing as much as possible upon strangers; but," he said "if you will leave it to me, I will manage it for you; for with all their knavery, they are the simplest people under the sun."
A few days afterwards, going out shooting, they saw a man loading his cart with peats, when the Scotchman, approaching him, said, after the usual salutation—"What are you going to do with the peats?"
"I'm going to Aberdeen to sell them," was the reply.
"What do you get for them?"
"One shilling and eightpence, sir." ”

“ Where the carcass is, there will the vulture be; and where there is a soft job, or obvious pickings, there you will find a Scotchman. So that throughout Ireland, Scotchmen have been scattered wherever the Government could find a place for one. There is scarcely an office, sub-office, or sub-deputy office worth [53] the having in all Ireland which has not been made the perquisite of a Protestant Scotchman. Even the Congested Districts Board employs Scotch factors, and Thom’s Almanac is little more than a catalogue of Scotch patronymics. ”

“ The young Scotchman succeeded better with his sharp intelligence and his untiring perseverance,—he is now known as the author of some of the best standard works on law, and he has forced his way into the Parliament where he honestly labours, as opportunity occurs, for the good of the dumb millions of India. ”

“ In fact, when he comes to take up any sort of a berth, it is with the consciousness that, as a Scot, it is his duty by hook or by crook to make himself master of the situation, and, if needs be, to turn out in the long run his own employer. If you ask a Scotchman how it comes to pass that so many of his compatriots hold positions of influence in commercial houses, he will reply, nine times out of ten, “Well, you see, we just drop into them.” ”

“ I think I shall like the Scotch people very much, but just now there is one thing about them that stands up as high above their other good points as the castle does above the rest of the city, and that is the feeling they have for anybody who has done anything to make his fellow-countrymen proud of him. A famous Scotchman cannot die without being pretty promptly born again in stone or bronze, and put in some open place with seats convenient for people to sit and look at him. ”

“ Well, you will 241 find that the man with small, keen eyes, who is able to do his work in the railroad car, warming himself comfortably by the stove, is invariably a Scotchman. There is only one berth with a stove in the whole business; it is he who has got it. Many times I have had a chat with that Scotchman on the subject of old Scotland. Many times I have sat with him in the little smoking-room of the parlor car, listening to the history of his life, or, maybe, a few good Scotch anecdotes. ”

“ One leading feature of the work offers a very aggressive invitation to criticism. Scotchmen are commonly accused of looking upon the whole universe through Scotch spectacles, and here we have a Scotchman treating a subject which affects nearly the whole of the globe, and devoting about half of his book to the details of Scottish glacial deposits; while England has but one-third of the space allowed to Scotland, Ireland but a thirtieth, Scandinavia less than a tenth, North America a sixth, and so on with the rest of the world. ”

“ Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it. It is curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical, delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist and it is a perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages which you have read. ”

“ You may trust something to the generosity and magnanimity of an Englishman or an Irishman; they act from an impulse of the blood or from a sense of justice: A Scotchman (the exceptions are splendid indeed) uniformly calculates the consequences to himself. He is naturally faithful to a leader, as I said before, that is, to a powerful head; but his fidelity amounts to little more than servility. ”

“ To whatever land the Scotchman might wander, to whatever calling he might betake himself, in America or in India, in trade or in war, the advantage which he derived from his early training raised him above his competitors. ”

“ And are the Scotch pitted against all the rest of the world, on the same principle that they formerly herded and banded together under some chosen leader, and harried the neighbouring district? This seems to be the most likely solution. A feeling of antipathy and partisanship, of offensive and defensive warfare, may be considered as necessary to the mind of a Scotchman. He is nothing in himself but as he is opposed to or in league with others. ”

“ The Scotchman, it is said somewhere, is not so much respected for the manner in which he goes about a thing as the way in which he does it, and the remark, when applied to this particular case, will be all the more potent. ”

“ Red hair is common in Scotland. One sees more of it in Edinburgh and Glasgow than in the whole of England; but the skin is so fine, the features are so delicate, the complexion so clear, that the little defect passes unperceived or forgiven. [Pg 91]
The men are hard and sinewy.
In point of appearance I prefer the English and Irish men. Scotchmen are well fitted for the battle of life. They are useful to their country but hardly ornamental.
The Scotchman is absorbed in business. In his leisure moments he goes into politics or theology; he studies or takes outdoor exercise. ”