How the Scots Invented the Modern World (52 page)

More immediately and perhaps more crucially, middle-class Scots took on the formidable job of cleaning up the mess that headlong industrialization had left behind. Scottish doctors took the lead as champions of municipal public health and hygiene as early as the 1780s, first in England, then in their own country. Manchester, the heart of the English Industrial Revolution, was totally transformed by Scots. Charles White, an Edinburgh M.D., founded the Manchester Infirmary and Lying-in Hospital. Another Edinburgh-trained doctor, Thomas Percival, browbeat Manchester hospitals into keeping statistics of births and deaths in order to allow doctors and officials to trace the progress of epidemic diseases in the city. John Farrier created the Manchester Board of Health, the first in England, set up special hospital wards for fever patients, and required the disinfecting of wards and private homes where fever was found. All these measures helped to limit the spread of infectious diseases such as typhus, and served as the model for other cities and public health officials.

In 1796, Farrier also established the link between unhealthy working conditions in the Manchester mills and the spread of disease and high mortality. He proposed that the mills “be subject to a general system of laws, for wise, humane, and equal treatment of all such works.” The notion of government regulation of workplace safety and health was born, which took another forty years for Parliament to finally address.

What Farrier and others did for Manchester (the founders of the city’s medical school in the early 1820s took Edinburgh as their direct model), John Heysham did for Carlisle in the 1780s, including introducing inoculation against smallpox. A similar group of unsung Scottish heroes took on Sheffield. Glasgow and Edinburgh had to wait until much later. William Alison, dean of the medical faculty at Edinburgh, took up public health issues only in the 1840s, and reform and slum clearances reached Glasgow still later.

By then the reforms of middle-class medicine were almost complete. James Simpson had introduced chloroform as an anesthetic for surgery in 1847, and then for childbirth. At the Glasgow medical school, William McEwen took up Joseph Lister’s idea of sterilizing surgical instruments and bandages, and together with Edinburgh’s Lister, made the use of antiseptics standard practice in British medicine. Over the long run, these changes, along with the gas streetlighting invented by one of Watt’s assistants, William Murdoch, may have done as much to save lives and raise living standards as many of the large-scale public hygiene projects of the same years.

Scottish public health efforts also differed from their English counterparts in two crucial respects. They tended to look more to the private sector to supply the necessary support and capital, and were unwilling to involve the state if private resources were available. They also laid heavy stress on the need for education and moral uplift, as well as cleanliness and sanitation. Some of this sprang from religious motives: the Glasgow Sunday School Union, for example, was very active in the troubled early decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1819 had enrolled nearly 7 percent of the city’s population. Thomas Chalmers preached voluntary relief as the solution to poverty, as part of the Kirk’s traditional parochial responsibilities. But part of it, too, was the classical liberal faith in the power of the individual to do good, both for himself and for others. No one exemplified this more than Dr. Samuel Smiles, the author of that classic tract on the Victorian faith in the individual,
Self-Help.

The book, and its famous motto, “God helps those who help themselves,” used to be derided as self-delusional propaganda, or Victorian hypocrisy at its worst. It is a more complex book than that, and its author a more complex man. Smiles was born in Haddington, and was an knowledgeable fan of the emerging scientific industrial culture his fellow Scots had done so much to create. He wrote an admiring biography of Thomas Telford; his great heroes were James Watt and James Nasmyth, inventor of the industrial steam hammer. He was also a doctor, trained at Edinburgh medical school. In Smiles, in fact, all the strands of Scottish faith in science, industry, and technology come together, along with its enlightened liberal belief in individual freedom and responsibility. The second edition of
Self-Help,
published in 1869, opened with a quotation from the Scottish-descended philosopher John Stuart Mill: “The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

Smiles wanted to inspire in his readers a sense of their own self-worth, both as individuals and as part of the rise of Britain as a great nation.
Self-Help
is the ancestor of all self-help and motivational books and audio tapes, the indispensable
vade mecums
of the person who feels overwhelmed by the tide and tempo of modern life. The emotional anchor Smiles offered his readers was the example of the great inventors, scientists, and businessmen who had risen above humble beginnings and conquered adversity to become useful and productive human beings. His examples were not exclusively Scottish or even British; they included Germans, French, and Italians (they were, however, all men). Each revealed the power of the individual to remake his life and his environment through hard work, perseverance (most of his examples are haunted by early failures), moral discipline, ceaseless optimism, and the energy to seize opportunities when they present themselves—Scottish virtues presented as a “personal power” to match the new mechanized power unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. You can be who you want to be, so choose carefully and learn to live with the result.

Smiles also stressed, like Telford, that success should not be measured just in material terms, or even personal, selfish ones. “National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness,” he admonished, “as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.”

Self-Help
was published on the heels of Britain’s embarrassing performance in the Crimean War, and its humiliation in the Indian Mutiny. It was a time when the future of the British Empire seemed once again very dim. There is a distinct note of patriotic pleading to aspects of the book, especially in this striking passage: “The spirit of self-help, as exhibited in the energetic action of individuals, has in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation.”

The
English
character? If the eighteenth-century Scot had subordinated himself to a larger whole as a “North Briton,” Smiles was now willing to carry things a step further. Scottish scientists and inventors such as Watt and Telford and Nasmyth, he was suggesting, were displaying a creative national character that turned out not to be Scottish at all, but English! It was an extraordinary piece of national selfeffacement, especially since Britain was becoming more reliant on its Scots than ever. If England’s claim to greatness in the second half of the nineteenth century rested on its laurels of empire, it was an empire largely built and organized by Scots.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Sun Never Sets: Scots and the British Empire

Success, like war and like charity in religion, covers a multitude of sins.

—Sir Charles Napier

One afternoon Robert Louis Stevenson noted a story in an Edinburgh newspaper about an apartment house in the Old Town that had suddenly collapsed, burying the residents in plaster and rubble. “All over the world,” he mused to himself, “in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth, ‘The house that I was born in fell down last night!’ ”

The Scottish mass migration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stevenson himself was born in Edinburgh and died in Samoa) was as momentous as any in history. In sheer numbers, it hardly stands out: perhaps 3 million all told, compared to the 8 million Italians who left their native land between 1820 and World War I. Yet its impact was far-reaching in more ways than one.

Scots blanketed the British dominions in North America from Georgia and Nova Scotia to Vancouver. They ranged across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand. Scots found employment in the teeming cities of India and on the South African veldt. Some set off for China, while others, like Stevenson himself, wandered the islands of the South Pacific and remote corners of Latin America. Nor should one forget the more than a half-million Scots who, like Henry Brougham and James Watt and Thomas Telford, packed their bags and headed for new horizons and new careers in London or Birmingham or Liverpool.

The great Scottish diaspora followed, and in some cases led, the development of what historians sometimes call the “second” British Empire. The first, organized around England’s monopoly of the Atlantic trade, effectively perished in the American Revolution. The new empire was a far more extensive and complex amalgam of far-flung dominions, territories, colonies, naval bases, and assorted dependencies, which eventually covered nearly one-fifth of the earth’s land surface and one-quarter of the world’s population. It was the first global community, an empire “on which the sun never sets,” in the phrase John Wilson of
Blackwood’s Magazine
first made famous. And without the Scots it might never have existed—let alone reached the status of legend it still holds today.

In fact, a Scot created the idea of the British Empire. Charles Pasley came from Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire, not far from where Thomas Telford had grown up. Like Telford, he had prodigious intellectual gifts (he translated the New Testament from Greek at age eight) that found their main outlet in solving technical problems. He served in the Royal Engineers in the Napoleonic Wars, and became Europe’s leading demolitions expert and siege warfare specialist. In 1810 he published
An Essay
on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire.
It completely changed the way Britons thought about their empire in relation to the rest of the world. In fact, Pasley had created modern geopolitics.

Pasley warned his fellow Britons that they could no longer rely on their “splendid isolation,” or the British navy, to keep them safe in the future. In the modern world, true national security rested on policy and power—especially military power. That included large overseas colonies, which could supply sailors for its navies and soldiers for Britain’s armies. “War we cannot avoid,” he warned. But if Britain thought offensively and acted vigorously, “what nation upon earth can resist us?”

Between the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the British Empire grew by an average of 100,000 square miles per year. At each turn, a coterie of Scots or men and women of Scottish descent took the lead. They operated sheep farms in New South Wales, grew rye and barley in Lower Ontario, worked in lumber camps in British Columbia, trapped beaver and otter along the Mackenzie River, managed coffee plantations in Ceylon, sold ships’ stores in the Falkland Islands, guarded the Officers’ Club in Mysore— and traded opium in Hong Kong and Canton. Their ubiquity and universal success inspired the frequently quoted maxim of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “It has been my lot to have found myself in many distant lands. I have never been in one without finding a Scotchman, and I never found a Scotchman who was not at the head of the poll.”

Part of their success was due to the fact that most Scottish emigrants, even the poorest, had more skills and education than their other European counterparts. This broad-based “brain drain” was bad news for Scotland over the long haul, but good news for the rest of the world. People wanted Scottish immigrants in their country, as temporary or permanent “guest workers,” whether in Australia or Argentina or the United States.

Also, this Scottish restlessness was nothing new. Scots had crisscrossed Scotland and Europe for centuries, looking for work and opportunity. They supplied the crucial manpower for England’s first overseas empire, as well: first as settlers in Northern Ireland during the reign of James I, and then as soldiers in His Majesty’s army.

The very first Highland “Watch,” or armed patrol, was raised in 1667 under Charles II. However, the Jacobite wars led the Crown to lose faith in the loyalty of its Scottish contingents, and they were disbanded. After the Fifteen clans loyal to the Stuarts raised a levy of troops to prowl the glens to suppress the remaining rebels. General Wade issued a dark-blue-and-green tartan for these companies of Highlanders, which gave them their name, the “Black Watch.”

The 42nd Highland Regiment, as the Black Watch was officially known, inspired imitators. Between 1740 and 1815, eighty-six Highland regiments were officially raised, many drawing their recruits and officers from a single clan. Some, like Munro’s regiment and the Royal Scots Fusiliers, fought at Culloden against the Jacobite clans; others, like Fraser’s Highlanders (the old 78th and 71st Regiments) and Keith’s and Campbell’s Highlanders, served with distinction in George II’s wars in North America and Europe. Later they fought loyally against the American colonists and Napoleon. By 1800 they were the backbone of the British army.

Recruiting volunteers was fairly easy. In the early years the official ban against all weapons and wearing of the tartan at home induced even chiefs’ sons and tacksmen to sign up as common soldiers. Chieftains ordered their clansmen to enlist in exchange for bounty, or as a matter of pride. The Duchess of Gordon raised her clansmen for the Gordon Highlanders in 1794 by touring the Huntly lands in regimental jacket and bonnet, and offering every new recruit a golden guinea and a kiss.
³¹
Of the 2,200 men in Lord MacLeod’s Highlanders (the 73rd Regiment), almost three-quarters came from MacLeod’s own clan area. Many of their fathers had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie—just as MacLeod himself had done, until George III issued him a pardon and brought him home to raise his regiment.