Proud Nation

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Luring the Dollars. Scotch whisky has long been the chief dollar-earner for Britain (though now rivaled by English automobiles). Scottish woolens, cardigans and tweeds are thriving. The little cashmere-sweater town of Hawick, with a working population of only 3,500, earned some $10 million in foreign currency last year —almost $3,000 per worker. To keep the dollars rolling in, the Scottish Council makes continuing surveys of foreign markets, puts out a monthly magazine listing export opportunities, and peppers Scottish exporters with useful tips, such as: "The president of the Canadian Association of Purchasing Agents is a Scot!" The council has lured 22 U.S. and two Canadian firms to Scotland, ranging from watchmakers (U.S. Time Corp. and Westclox) through electric razors (Sunbeam) and business machines (I.B.M., National Cash Register), with such success that $3 out of every $4 invested in industry in the British Isles since the war has been invested in Scotland.

Prosperity has brought a problem strange to Scotland—the need for more manpower. Over the years, Scotland's greatest export has always been Scotsmen. There are four Scots abroad for every one in Scotland. Its white-collar class fled from its dour hills and sooty cities, and as the warmth died from the great Glasgow furnaces, its best working manpower drained away to other lands. Today that wasting loss of the nation's best blood has been stanched.

Hardest hit by emigration were the Highlands, that rocky, storm-lashed and lovely country of glens, burns and lochs which makes up more than half of Scotland's land area. Only 300,000 stubborn crofters are left, and the men are mostly old. There are not enough able-bodied men to attract industry, and not enough industry to keep able-bodied men there. But dozens of dams and power stations are being built or planned (Scotland's prewar generating capacity has been increased fivefold), forests are being reseeded and replanted, abandoned farms reclaimed from the encroaching bracken. John Hobbs, a Canadian who made a fortune in whisky, has set out to woo the Highland crofter from his sheep and show him how to make more money with cattle, demonstrating with a 16,000-acre ranch of his own, complete from cowboys to roundups.

The Foreign English. In both Highlands assistance and Lowlands development, British government money has contributed a massive share. But to the Scots, the government in London is still "the English government" and the Englishman a foreigner. Their finances and their fate are inextricably bound up with England, but, if only as a point of pub honor, Scots hate to admit it. They profess grave doubt that their 1707 union with England is a good thing. They bristle at small slights. It rankles that some English ministries call their Scotland representatives "Regional Controllers," that the Festival of Britain brochures chopped off Scotland at the Tweed, that the English refuse to admit that Queen Elizabeth is only Elizabeth I in Scotland and coronation posters trace her lineage from the first Queen Elizabeth —"meaning she's directly descended exclusively from a virgin queen, I suppose," said one Scot scornfully. "No mention of Mary, Queen of Scots, in her lineage."