Stone of Destiny Read Free

could do by themselves. I was ashamed.
    Shame was what characterised the mid twentieth-century Scot. The shame was that we were not English. We had lost our sense of community. English customs, English pronunciations, English table manners were the mark of success. You were nothing if you did not speak proper, and proper was to speak with a south of England accent, or as near to it as the inherited muscles of the Scottish lips and tongue could manage. People even tried to think as the English did, and if there is one thing a people cannot do, it is to use the thought processes of another people. Most Scots thought of themselves as a sort of second-class English.
    Well, I didn’t. Screw them. I would show them. Fellow Scots and English as well, I would show them. I would show the world, for that matter. There was no enmity towards the English in this and no hatred. I have sometimes made snide remarks about the English that were as unworthy of me as they were of them. These remarks concealed an admiration, which never needed concealment.The English take their love of liberty with them wherever they go. Tom Paine made England too hot to hold him, and emigrated to the United States, where he invented the name they now bear. As in America so also in Scotland. When they come to live among us they very soon become Scots, a nationality which is open to all. But gang warily if you get under an Englishman’s skin. They are a proud people.
    I had no intention in these days of ganging warily. I tripped when I tried. I still do. The only place where I can open my mouth without once again ruining my career is in the dentist’s chair. In 1950, though, I was lucky enough to meet a man after my own heart, who helped to canalise my thoughts, and who set my mind to work in a more practical fashion. He was John MacDonald MacCormick, Lord Rector of Glasgow University, an honorary office. Election to it is by the student body. He was Chairman of the Scottish Covenant Association. The Scottish Covenant of 1948, which was promoted by him, had been signed by two million Scots. It asserted the right of Scotland to a Scottish Parliament for Scottish affairs. I went along with this. I took part. Yet my ambition went far beyond any reform in our political institutions. Scotland is only a small part of the earth’s surface, and reform of our government will be just another shuffle round of the people who hold power. It is reform in our attitude that is necessary. Whatever form of government we had, I wanted us to be a nation once again.
    In the community of the world, nations are the individuals. Unless each nation makes its own separate and distinct contribution, humanity will fall into one amorphous mass, degenerate, indistinct, inactive. Variety is the ideal of nature, and we Scots were losing our distinctive variety. In the Scotland of the 1940s the official address was not Scotland but North Britain. Scotland was sleeping, and ignoring the great abilities that it had always possessed, and over which we had been put on sacred guard. The soul of a nation is in its people’s keeping, and we no longerworried about our nation’s soul. A person’s soul is a trifle. A person who spends his life worrying about his salvation is not one I greatly admire. But a nation is a different thing. When we give away our soul, we have nothing left to give.
    Now these are brave words, but as a young man I had the qualifications to utter them. My prime qualification was that I did not know my place. I never have. So many Scots, forgetting that one of the great features of our history is the mobility between the classes, have lapsed into the English habit of thought best expressed in the words ‘I wouldn’t presume. I hope I know my place.’ I always presume. I have never known my place. I am the second son of a tailor from Paisley, one of Scotland’s provincial towns. Paisley will not easily forgive me for calling it that, for Paisley believes that it is the