WHY SCOTCHMEN GET ON.
MR. HELPS, in some one of his pleasant essays, says the first rule for success in life is to get yourself born, if you can, North of the Tweed, and Americans seem disposed to endorse his opinion. Mr. Hewitt, a Pennsylvanian ironmaster, has publicly confessed that even a Yankee, shrewdest of mankind, whose natural faculty for " superintending " is so great that if he were thrown ashore on a desert island he would in a week teach the penguins to cook and forage for him, is no match for a Scotchman. He can't keep him under, and is actually afraid, so Mr. Hewitt says, to admit him as a workman, lest he should become too rapidly the owner. There was probably the faintest twinkle about Mr. Hewitt's lips as he threw that little story to his Scotch questioner,—but the little romance is only the exaggeration of a truth. The Scotch do get on, particularly abroad, as no other people do, and it is to our minds still an unexplained or half-ex- plained puzzle why they do, for the popular English notions on the subject can be shown to be incorrect, or at all events inadequate.. Englishmen say Scotchmen are mean, and add farthing to farthing, and as compared with the most wasteful race that ever existed—. wastefulness rises with our people into a positive vice—they are doubtless thrifty ; but half the races of mankind are more parsi- monious than they. Frenchmen beat them hollow in meanness, and an Italian has a talent for not spending which would excite envy in the breast of a Shoreditch guardian. Scialoja defended' his tax on flour by the argument that unless he taxed a necessity an Italian would be sure to do without the taxed article, and it was assailed in the same debate on the ground that Italians even now would not eat enough to keep themselves healthy, a perfectly true allegation, as all Anglo-Tuscans know. Our own experience of colonists, which has been large, induces us to believe that of the four classes of British emigrants, the Irish, when not reckless, are incomparably the "closest," that the Welsh stand next, and thit the Scotchman is only careful by the side of the quick-spending Englishman. As a rule, he is hospitable, loves comfort, and is not altogether indifferent to display. It is said that he is better educated, but this, though true of the lowest orders, is not true of the middle class, the average Englishman being at least as well informed as the average Scotch- man, who so often passes him in the race of life, and making as much use of his information. At home, indeed, the Scotchman is apt to be the less educated of the two, his experience being a little narrower, and his book learning more limited. Then it is said they help one another, and so get on like a corporation, which is true of the Highlanders, but not, that we have observed, of the Lowland Scotch, though they have, no doubt, a preference for employing men of their own creed, association, and language. But it is in the service of Englishmen that Scotchmen generally rise—their own countrymen are much harder on them—and they show none of the excessive clannishness of the lower Irish, who stick together like bees, and drag one another down instead of up. The hard- ness, too, which Englishmen attribute to them in business is very- much exaggerated. They are very little harder, though leas liberal, than Englishmen, and much easier to deal with than any Conti- nental race, except the Dutch. The French shopkeeper, who smiles so readily, and the Italian, who is so gentle, will drive a bargain which would make a Scotchman ashamed of himself, and press a debtor to suicide where the Scotchman would, as long as he fully acknowledgd the debt, make sacrifices to give him time. And, lastly, the Scotch persistency is a good deal exaggerated in popular belief. He is, no doubt, persevering and patient, more patient and more persevering than most men, but he does not exhibit those qualities in a greater degree than the Englishman, especially the Englishman of the North, and is apt to grow a little impatient under continued failure. Stephenson• was, at least, as persevering as Paterson.
The causes of Scotch success, and particularly of their success outside Scotland, must, we think, be sought elsewhere than in either the thriftiness or the dourness of the Scotch character. Nations rarely thrive through their foibles, and in Scotland these qualities, useful as they may be, are often exaggerated into foibles. The secrete of Scotch success as emigrants are, we conceive, not these, but other qualities, and mainly their adaptability and faculty for command. The average Scotchman, hard in demeanour and prag- matical in mind, literal, narrow, and Calvinistic, is, nevertheless, one of the most adaptable of mankind. There is a fund of reason- ableness in him which enables him to adapt himself to circum- stances, to " tolerate the intolerable," as Tom Brown expresses it, as no other human being can do. Nobody is so independent, and nobody likes his own way more keenly, but a Scotchman makes an almost perfect servant. He does not hate his employer for em- ploying him, as nine Englishmen in ten do, and does not think service a profession, as Frenchmen and Germans are so apt to do. He means to be master himself some day soon, and meanwhile there is the employer and there is the work, and both are natural facts, and he obeys the one and does the other with a reasoning fidelity. Scotch clerks, and "factors," and agents, and employes generally are simply the best in the world, unapproachable by Englishmen, and rivalled only by Germans of the very beat kind. That single capacity, the capacity, of obedi- ence without becoming obedient, smooths the path of every Scotch- man in the beginning of life, and the same temperament makes tteelf manifest in other and higher departments of work. The Scotch, for example, have always throughout their history succeeded in France, that is, among the people who, of all others existing, are in their essential character least like them. They do not change there, they do not lose their own characteristics, but they just do what the English will not,—they accept France. They consequently never excite the hatred which attaches to the Englishman abroad, and which is not excited so much by what critics call his inso- lence, as by a sort of knobbiness of character, a determination never to fit in any hole he has not made himself. We remember talking at Cairo to a blue-eyed, fair-haired Bey, who had risen high in the Egyptian service. He was as Scotch in ways, thoughts, and dialect, as if he had never left the Clyde, and any- body more unlike an Egyptian it would be hard to find. But he was among Egyptians simply an Egyptian, liked and trusted, and influential. In the same position an Englishman would either have become base or have fretted his heart out. It is the same in India. The Scotch push there more vehemently than any race, and are, we think, quite as apt as Englishmen to dislike the natives ; but they rarely contract the English hatred of the country, accept the people they do not like, yield to all climatic conditions, and in their grave, stiff way either reconcile themselves to facts or the facts to them. They change in India much less than the English do—the Anglo-Indian is less like an Englishman in ideas than an Australian or American—but they fit themselves in, and are often exceedingly popular. The Scotch Missionaries in Bengal, for example, have among all missionaries perhaps the greatest influence over the people, an influence the more remarkable because they of all missionaries have taken least trouble to acquire the native tongues. Our Scotch friends, we imagine, would smile to hear Dr. Duff called an " adaptable " man, but watch a group of Bengalee students talking to him and to any Englishman what- ever, and note the difference in the confidence given to each. It is the same in America. Of all men alive, the Scotchman has perhaps the least respect for the idea or the practice of equality, but the equality of ways in New England does not fret him as it does Englishmen ; he regards a habit, like spitting, as a fact, not as a sort of insult to himself, and pushes along gravely and comfortably to his proper place, moving very fast as Mr. Hewitt half wrathfully, half humorously testifies, but some- how not using his elbows too much. The Englishman must use his elbows to keep up his self-respect. Naturally a character of this kind makes a good master ; we do not mean a kindly, but an efficient one, and for getting on in the world there is no quality like efficient masterfulness. It multiplies force many times. The Scotchman is rarely a tyrant, he never exerts use- less authority, but everybody under him has to keep to the collar, and to hold his tongue about little galls. The Southerners used to say that Scotchmen made the best slavedrivers, not so cruel as the Yankees, more steadily stern than the English ; and they suc- ceed equally- well in Asia. A Scotchman will get more work done in a Bengalee indigo factory, with less fuss and irritation among the people, than any other human being, and the same fact is perceptible in the construction of railways. He has, no doubt, one accidental advantage. To all Asiatics except the Chinaman, the average Englishman, with his energetic ways and excessive quickness of speech—even when linguists they leave out half the needful words, as Eothen remarked—and inveterate pro- clivity to chaff, seems the most detestable of created beings. He loathes him as cultivated Englishmen often loathe a noisy, boast- ful, untrustworthy Irishman, who has perhaps twice their quick- ness of perception and susceptibility to external influences ; and the grave, patient, stern Scotchman is infinitely preferred. The Scotchman is far the harder master, but in an experience of years we never heard a Scotchman interrupt a native, and never heard a native make a long statement to an Englishman without an interruption. Now, an Asiatic prefers a little oppression to having his words cut short.
This power of masterfulness is not precisely power of adminis- tration. It is dependent on personal qualities, and when personal intercourse fails is apt to become wanting. The Scotch have not given us many great statesmen,—Mr. Gladstone is far and away the greatest they have yet produced—and not very many administrators, Lord Dalhousie being, with his merits and draw- backs, their greatest outcome in that way. And it may be observed that after a certain point their exceptional talent for getting on deserts them. They do not build businesses or fortunes absolutely of the first class in anything like proper proportion. Whenever the affair transcends the limits within which they can personally govern, their main defect, narrowness alike of purpose and of sympathy begins to embarrass them, and they succeed no better than Englishmen of the same calibre, perhaps not quite so well. Even in India, where everything is in their favour, the Scotch scarcely rise quite to the top in due proportion, just as they have not given us their proper contingent of Premiers. One could not imagine a Scotch Shakespeare any more than a French, and the want of that possibility of being many-sided is, we be- lieve, the real reason why Scotchmen, who beat us in every, walk of life except journalism, have never furnished us with a caste of rulers.
Previous page
