uble they take care to keep the Cabinet well filled with Scotchmen.
The English for shame's sake can't get out of the Union, so they
retaliate by saying that the Scotch have no sense of humour. But there's
nothing in it. One has only to ask any of the theatrical people and they
will tell you that the audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh are the best
in the British Isles--possess the best taste and the best ability to
recognise what is really good.

The reason for this lies, I think, in the well-known fact that the
Scotch are a truly educated people, not educated in the mere sense of
having been made to go to school, but in the higher sense of having
acquired an interest in books and a respect for learning. In England
the higher classes alone possess this, the working class as a whole know
nothing of it. But in Scotland the attitude is universal. And the more
I reflect upon the subject, the more I believe that what counts most
in the appreciation of humour is not nationality, but the degree of
education enjoyed by the individual concerned. I do not think that there
is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour
than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated
and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented
exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become
atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the
accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes
a fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educated
appreciation of humour is there--away down. Generally, if one attempts
to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneath
him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he
is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointless
story from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his guard and has no
jealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring with laughter and wiping
his spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him converted as by
magic into the merry, clever little school-boy that he was thirty years
ago, before his education ossified him.

But with the illiterate and the rustic no such process is possible. His
sense of humour may be there as a sense, but the mechanism for setting
it in operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the broadest and most
elementary forms of joke can reach him. The magnificent mechanism of the
art