Stone of Destiny Read Free Page A

centre of the universe. Maybe it is. Certainly it was in Paisley, and in my father’s house there, that I first read Disraeli’s great words, ‘Learn to aspire.’
    It was from my father that I also learned another lesson that has never left me, which is this: man is answerable only to God for his conduct, and if there is no God, a matter about which I have always been in great doubt, then he is answerable only to his own conscience. No man-made law tells a free man what to do. All it does is tell him what the punishments will be if he breaks the man-made law. It is the moral conscience of each individual that binds people together, and makes community life possible. Not courts, not lawyers, not judges, and certainly not the police. They are merely the regulators, but we are the people. It is we who make the community. Ourselves alone.
    I was one of these people, and I was very much alone. In the autumn of 1949 I went down to London, and had my first look at the Stone of Destiny.

Chapter Three

    My first reconnaissance of Westminster Abbey was a leisurely affair, and took in little detail. Detail would come later. I walked round, looked, and came back home satisfied that if I could get a few people together then it would all be possible, but I did not know a single person to turn to for help. It was a lonely time, and that was as far as it went that year. I knew John MacCormick only slightly then, and I had no close friends to confide in. I did indeed take my thoughts to Christopher Murray Grieve, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work I greatly admired, but the idea was to simmer with me for another year before it was to be formulated into any practical shape.
    It is not easy for one young man on his own to formulate a plan of action. Dreams are for dreaming, and I did not regard myself as any sort of man of action. In a settled society ambitions are modest; day follows day, rubbing life thin, without any wear being noticed. The soldier who goes into action has a long training behind him, and is urged forward by the society he lives in. Ever present is the sanction of public opinion, forcing him to do things that would otherwise be forbidden. Nothing public urged me forward and indeed public opinion was very much against any sort of individual action. What I had in mind would put me outside the law, and I would have to face theconsequences. In these circumstances the personal bar to action was very considerable. A cocoon of loneliness kept my dreams apart from reality.
    Then in the autumn of 1950 I was invited to join the Glasgow student committee supporting John MacCormick’s rectorial candidature. I met all sorts of people through that and the cocoon began to wear thin. I met people who began to talk of strong measures, and who pointed to the melancholy history of Ireland. ‘From the blood of martyrs,’ they muttered, ‘grow living nations.’ Their eagerness to find a martyr was only paralleled by their desire to live to see the fruits of martyrdom. To be fair to them, most of them have lived to become martyrs to endless committee meetings in the Labour Party, or the Scottish National Party, so they are not to be laughed at. For my part, I would rather have the fire at the stake. Yet I listened to their talk.
    Nowadays people sing rather than talk, but the old songs had not been revived then, and the new ones were unwritten. I listened silently to talk of sending Blue Bonnets over the Border, and wondered what it all meant. Of course it meant nothing, but I had not the self-confidence to see that, and I felt that there was something missing in me. Did they know something I didn’t know? Were they going to do something that I couldn’t do? Students have talked like this from time immemorial, but I did not know that then. I was overawed by their terribly grown-up sophistication, but I enjoyed being a spectator at their performance. Blue Bonnets over the Border sounded great.
    It was still a long way from listening to