DEGENERATE SCOTLAND.

Evening Star, Issue 12101, 6 November 1908, Page 4

DEGENERATE SCOTLAND.

In old days, when religion was a power in Scotland, material prosperity in the form of accumulated wealth did not wholly absorb the mind, and poverty did not seem to be tie | one unutterable woe With the decay of j religious belief and of church authority society has no higher aim than worldly success, I which takes the form of an inordinate thirst for wealth and for the grosser pleasures which wealth can buy. Increased leisure, so far as the people arc concerned, is mainly devoted to sordid pleasures, and thus we have a social state characterised by great economic inequalities, giving birth to masses of sordid poverty, giving birth to (Socialism, with its gospel of discontent. On the intellectual side we have scepticism, with a lowering of ideals manifesting itself in the lower orders in a painful, dreary social life, in the middle classes in sheer Philistinism, and in the upper classes in worship at the sbrino ol pleasure. In Scotland to-day there are the appropriate conditions for the rise of a Balzac and a Zola, a Dickens and a Thackeray. We need a Scottish Balzac to paint the dreary middle-class life of Scotland, a Zola to depict the awful sociil and industrial conditions in which the poor live, a Dickens to focus the humanitarian influences which are specially active at present, and a Thackeray to pierce to the heart of the shams of our public life.—Hector Macpkcrson, in ‘ Glasgow jEerald.’