Scotland the Brief

Part 2: Imperial Partner
14 Reform

Britains was a liberal empire, and much of its effectiveness came from the free movement of its elites among the institutions of state: something that had its roots in the removable inequalities of its constitution, always quick to adapt, and always mindful that those whom the law neglects will always be enemies to law, and will always be dangerous, more or less. The words were those of a great Liberal, administrator, and historian, of Gaelic descent, T B Macaulay.

The 1832 Reform act wasnt achieved without a struggle, particularly in English towns, where the Castle of Nottingham and the Palace of Bristol were laid low. Scotland was quieter Dundas 'management' ended in 1826 but her intellectuals, running the Edinburgh Review, did much to expand the agitation. The English electorate doubled, the Scots (extended by creating a new franchise and urban constituencies) went up from 5000 to 65,000.

Reform, however, did little for the mass of the people. How were they to cope with dispossession on the land, and the often enforced flight into the towns? Up to the 1840s this upheaval seemed almost apocalyptic, and even among the well-off there thrived millenarian or utopian ideals. Robert Owen, the Welsh owner of the New Lanark Mills and social experimenter, promoted his new view of society on every possible occasion. His schemes usually collapsed, but they trained a generation of working-class activists who would eventually gain a qualified utopia in the trade unions and the Co-op societies. Scottish Chartism was political rather than social; its leaders, organised on a British basis, argued for their six points: universal manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, payment of members, secret ballots, no property qualifications, and annual parliaments; but some of them also had particular Scots enthusiasms, like temperance or adult education.

This ideal, in the hands of the most remarkable figure of the generation, went much further. Chartism by Thomas Carlyle (1839) probed the cultural as well as social problems the industrial revolution had released, and his analysis predicted a coming explosion, leading directly to Marx and Engels' 'Communist Manifesto' (1848), to the propaganda of Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854): 'a bolt of lightning' in a china shop'.

The Scots Chartists were well organised, generally moral-force and legalistic, and ineffective. If you wanted to be a democrat, then go to Canada, or by the 1850s Australia and New Zealand. By the mid-century there were also civic careers to be made overseas in the churches, in medicine, and in education at home: tasks that would in Europe have gone to national parliaments were shared between Westminster and increasingly powerful Scottish burghs whose powers were increased to cope with the challenges of poverty, disease and pollution. These tasks lay before a country particularly famous for the quality of its medical education, spectacularly realised in projects like infirmaries, the pioneer Medical Officers of Health, and Glasgows water supply, piped from Loch Katrine in the South Highlands in 1859.