Albyn by Hugh MacDiarmid — Read

"We should be the last to assert that there are no aspects of the smaller nationalism worth conserving," says another opponent; "there are many, but the best of them are alive and effective in Scotland to-day, and they have no necessary connection with the structure of Government. But Scotland, without losing her sense of herself as a Scottish nationality, has attained to a full and complete sense of a larger nationality, and she is not going to throw off that sense of partnership in larger nationality under the leadership of archaic and thrown-back minds, all of them belonging to the largely denationalized region of Clydeside. " Now the fact of the matter is that no valuable aspect of "the smaller nationalism" is permitted to function, except under extraordinary handicaps, by the conditions of progressive Anglicization (in violation of even such safeguarding clauses as the Treaty of Union contained), which have increasingly dominated Scotland during the past hundred years. Scotland has ceased to hold any distinctive place in the political or cultural map of Europe. The centralization of book-publishing and journalism in London-the London monopoly of the means of publicity-has reduced Scottish arts and letters to shadows of their former or potential selves, qualitatively beneath contempt in comparison with the distinctive arts and letters of any other country in Europe. There is no Scottish writer to-day of the slightest international standing.

Scotland connotes to the world "religious" bigotry, a genius for materialism, "thrift," and, on the social and cultural side, Harry Lauderism and an exaggerated sentimental nationalism, which is obviously a form of compensation for the lack of a realistic nationalism. No race of men protest their love of country so perfervidly as the Scots-no country in its actual conditions justifies any such protestations less. Every recent reference book in any department of human activity shows the position to which Scotland has degenerated. "Europa, 1926" (although it is presumably designed for British readers) lists contemporary Czech and Bulgarian poets, litterateurs, musicians, etc. (the bare names-which convey nothing! ) but it excludes Scotland completely. Ireland, on the contrary, has a section to itself, and a special article on the boundary question. Professor Pittard's "Race and History," doing justice to every other people under the sun, deals only very slightly and imperfectly with Scotland, and fails to take account of any of the newer material, _e.g._, the works of Tocher. Like examples can be multiplied in every direction.