. But there is nothing in which
the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect,
than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of
Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what
makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains.
It is poetry. It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or
(what is worse) magic. Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something
of this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and
serfdoms; the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then,
in Scotland, the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean
the self-made man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as
well as to others. It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is
quite mad, and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of
kleptomaniac; but though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does
exist; I have met quite two of him. Him alone among modern merchants
we do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit. Something of the
irresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him. Our
scientific civilisation is not a civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance.
Like smoke it is choking us; like smoke it will pass away. Only of one
or two Scotsmen, in my experience, was it true that where there is smoke
there is fire.

But there are other kinds of fire; and better. The one great advantage
of this strange national temper is that, from the beginning of all
chronicles, it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotland
nearly everything has always been in revolt—especially loyalty.
If these people are capable of making Glasgow, they are also capable of
wrecking it; and the thought of my many good friends in that city makes
me really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as the
more huge calamity of the two. In Scotland there are many rich men so
weak as to call themselves strong. But there are not so many poor men
weak enough to believe them.

As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road. They had
little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps, like the fairies
who used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes. They were not, however,
strictly speaking, fairies. They might have been called gnomes, since
they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills. They worked
in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires. Just at the moment
wh