, privilege of national
independence; he will think they must have been pure fanatics who spilt
their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in
their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who
sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the
House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the
warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it
is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of
common sense, as applied to human conduct, that has given the Scottish
race their unique position among the tribes of men.

And, even in this age of steam and electricity, they will still cherish
their romance. It was but the other day that there was pointed out to
the Gordon Highlanders in the Transvaal the expediency of exchanging the
garb of old Gaul for a uniform of khaki: the one would be less of a
shining mark for the enemy than the other, and, its adoption would
probably result in saving many lives. You know their decision. I think I
hear them say, "All this may well be true; but we stand by the kilt and
the tartan." That, a critical world may say, is magnificent, but it is
not war. We say, magnificent or not, it is war; for the kilt and the
tartan are inseparable from the sentiment that makes these men the
redoubtable soldiers they are. Take those away, and you break their
touch with a continuous tradition which transforms every man in the
regiment, be he Scottish, English or Irish, into a Gordon, with all the
dash and vim and dare-devil courage that centre around the name. The
Gordon blood in him helped Byron to understand and express the potency
of the Highland tradition:--

"But, with the breath that fills
Their mountain pipe, so fill the mountaineers
With the fierce native daring which instills
The stirring memories of a thousand years.
And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears."

May there never come a time when the mind of our race will be closed
against such a sentiment as that! Let us go on doing our share,
resolutely, faithfully, conscientiously, of the work of the world; let
us keep well to the front with the same success that we have done of
yore; but let us not forget that we owe the unconquerable spirit in us
to our Auld Mither Scotland, that it is from her breast there has been
drawn the celestial ichor which has nourished genius in the cottage