Synopses & Reviews
THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCOTLAND BY AGNES MURE MACKENZIE C. B. E., LL. D., M. A., D. Litt. OLIVER BOYD LTD. EDINBURGH TWEEDDALE COURT LONDON 39A WELBECK STREET, W. i. Then said I unto them, Ye see the e il case that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire come and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach. And I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me as also of the king s words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let us nse up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good work. But when Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they laughed us to scorn, and despised us, and said, What is this thing that ye do ... Then answered I them, and said unto them, The God of heaven, he will prosper us therefore we his servants will arise and build but ye ha e no portion, nor right, nor memorial, in Jerusalem. Nehetmah, II. Els oiuvbs dptffros d xiVw cu irepi Trd Hector in Iliad on a snuff-bo Scott s. The best omen is that one is fighting for one s country. XH. Engraved snuff-box of Sir Walter GENERAL PREFACE HISTORY is more than a study of things past. It is a study of the roots of the present, of the seeds of the future. No man can guide present or future who forgets it, and one major cause of Scotland s unhappy present is that, though her sense of the past is still keen and vivid, she recalls it only confusedly and in part. If she is to shape her future worthily, that past must be recalled and understood, not as a series of highly coloured stories but as a consecutive process of event. These volumes are an attempt to understand it, to study thegrowth of Scotland as a nation and as a part in the larger whole of Europe. I have tried in special to consider those problems that in succession have presented themselves to the men responsible for governing Scotland, because every native reader of these books is himself responsible for governing Scotland, or will be when he reaches voting age. And I have also tried, consistently, to deal with things, people, actions, and desires, not with forms of words. It is easy to think in those, but there is no deadlier habit of the mind. We have seen often enough in our own time how men fighting for the word Freedom can end as slaves. Men must fight not for freedom but to be free men, not for prosperity but for a prosperous viii GENERAL PREFACE country and to know what a free man is they must know what a man is not a sound or a pattern of black marks on paper but a curious three-dimensional complex creature that works and eats and suffers and rejoices, loves certain things and hates others, and can act in some accordance with these loves and hatreds. History was never made by the alphabet, in any per mutation or combination, but by what men were and valued and believed, did or refrained from doing or failed to do. I have tried to put back again into the picture certain elements that for the last two hundred years have frequently been, for practical reasons, omitted from the official teaching of the subject, thus considerably distorting the common impression. I have also tried, in dealing with various conflicts, to give the aims of the opposing parties not in the formulae used by their descendants but as in their own contemporary state ments, and as far as possible in their own words. Thusinstead of merely praising those crucial docu ments, the two Covenants, or merely denouncing them, I have printed their text, which appears to be unfamiliar to most Scots. I have quoted freely the operative phrases from a good many others, and given a careful precis of others again which do not lend themselves to quotation in fragments but are too voluminous to quote in extenso, such as the Treaty of Northampton, the Confession of Faith of the 1560 Reformers, the Articles of Perth, or the Treaty of Union...