It was the first systematic attempt to apply the Scottish school"s four-stage theory to a non-European culture. Mill thought it would take him three years; in fact it took him eleven. Weighing the Hindu and Muslim cultures of India in the scale of civilization"s progress over barbarism, Mill found them woefully wanting. He dismissed India"s ancient religious traditions as "superst.i.tion"; he attacked its emperors and rajahs as small-minded tyrants who abused their subjects and grew fat and lazy on the backs of the poor. He reserved a special contempt for its laws, which he compared to those of Europe in the Dark Ages, and its caste system, which "stands a more effective barrier against the welfare of human nature than any other inst.i.tution which the workings of caprice and of selfishness have ever produced."
Mill"s attack on India"s culture and civilization makes hard reading in today"s multiculturalist age. But his anger sprang from his liberal, even radical, sympathies (he was the friend and disciple of the founder of English radicalism, Jeremy Bentham). He wanted European-style progress to raise up the lives of the Indian peasant and urban artisan, who found themselves overtaxed and powerless, as well as denied a basic human dignity by Hinduism"s relentlessly rigid rules of caste. If India"s rulers were incapable of changing this, Mill declared, then the British had to. "A simple form of arbitrary government," Mill wrote, "tempered by European honour and European intelligence, is the only form which is now fit for Hindustan." He wanted the British to take command-not in order to enhance their own power and profits (the East India Company already had plenty of both), but to make India into a modern, "civilized" society.
It was the issue of bringing progress to the Highlands all over again, but in a tropical climate. Mill had given birth to the idea of what Rudyard Kipling would call "the white man"s burden," and the impact on British policy was swift. Mill was appointed to a post at East India House, and the book itself went into four editions. The president of the Board of Control took Mill"s arguments to heart, as did a future president, Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay detested Mill"s left-wing politics and wrote a famous essay ridiculing them in the Edinburgh Edinburgh Review. Review. But Mill"s radical ideas on legal reform, which Macaulay thought unsuitable for England, he saw as perfect for India. Macaulay called But Mill"s radical ideas on legal reform, which Macaulay thought unsuitable for England, he saw as perfect for India. Macaulay called The The History of British India History of British India "the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since Gibbon." He pressed hard to implement its proposed reforms, along with a national English-language school system for India-shades of Scotland"s own common parish schools. "the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since Gibbon." He pressed hard to implement its proposed reforms, along with a national English-language school system for India-shades of Scotland"s own common parish schools.
But a new British policy was already taking shape in India, thanks to another coterie of Scots. They were the brilliant and dedicated proteges of Lord Minto, the Edinburgh-educated governor-general who arrived in India in 1806 after the Duke of Wellington had pacified the Maratha princes. Minto himself oversaw the end of the East India Company"s monopoly over British trade in 1813. In southern India, Thomas Munro, later governor of Madras, fought to reduce the tax burden on ordinary farmers and pushed for a system of honest tax collectors (which Parliament approved in 1812) and for independent village courts (which it did not). John Campbell spent sixteen years in the remote hill country between Madras and Calcutta rescuing potential victims of ritual human sacrifice, or meriah. meriah. By the time he finished, he had saved more than fifteen hundred lives and prevented the kidnaping of thousands more. By the time he finished, he had saved more than fifteen hundred lives and prevented the kidnaping of thousands more.
John Malcolm, an Eskdale native, negotiated a groundbreaking treaty with Persia, which brought peace along India"s northwestern border. Mountstuart Elphinstone became Lord Minto"s most trusted aide, and broke the power of the last Maratha robber barons. A skilled diplomat and a tough soldier, he was also a devoted cla.s.sical scholar who rose every morning in the summer at four to read Sophocles before his predawn gallop across the landscape. Like all the best Scottish imperialists, Elphinstone saw Britain"s rule in India as basically temporary. He wrote to James Mackintosh, who was then Recorder in Bombay, that the Empire"s "most desirable death" would be "the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign government," including Britain, to retain power. Which is, in fact, what did happen, 140 years later.
This was a new kind of imperialism, a liberal imperialism, which came to characterize British rule elsewhere in the world. It involved taking over and running another society for its own good-not by saving its soul through Christianity, as other European imperialisms had claimed to do, but in material terms. One could even say, in Scottish terms: better schools, better roads, more just laws, more prosperous towns and cities, more money in ordinary people"s pockets and more food on their tables. Governor-General George Bentinck even framed it with a nod to Francis Hutcheson: "England"s greatness is founded on Indian happiness." And for all its faults and shortcomings and hypocrisies, this liberal imperialism did manage to transform India into a more humane, orderly, and modern society. One could even say a freer society, except, of course, in the "narrow" political sense.
Or at least James Mill and others saw it as narrow. Mill"s teacher Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how how a government came into being-whether by democratic or representative means, or by hereditary rule or even by conquest-mattered less than a government came into being-whether by democratic or representative means, or by hereditary rule or even by conquest-mattered less than what what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not, then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it. the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not, then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it.
In 1707 Scotland had surrendered her political sovereignty and allowed herself to be run by a government five hundred miles away. The results had been spectacularly successful, particularly for Scotland"s urban middle cla.s.s. Why not the Indians? Why not other peoples waiting to be brought up from barbarism and superst.i.tion into the bright glare of modernity?
James Mill made this quasi-paternalist view the cornerstone of British colonial policy. Eventually it affected politics in Britain as well. The later Scottish school of Dugald Stewart had reached a startling conclusion, which also contained a paradox: politics as an expression of "the will of the people" mattered less than previous thinkers had imagined. On the one hand, self-government was the fruit of civilized advancement and a worthy goal for any people-including Indians. On the other, the general welfare of a modern, complex society profited most from applying "the science of legislation," in Dugald Stewart"s phrase, which increasingly meant rule by experts and bureaucrats.
A fundamental rift was beginning to surface in the modern political imagination, with intelligent Scots aligned on both sides. The last generation of the Scottish Enlightenment became convinced that the only politics a modern society requires is strong effective government. The growth of the civil service and bureaucracy in nineteenth-century Britain, the beginnings of the welfare state in the twentieth-all were confident expressions of government"s ability to manage and antic.i.p.ate the ma.s.sive social changes modern society creates, so that people can get on with their lives. But this confidence also blinded liberals to the emotional force and appeal of nationalism, which, by contrast, old-fashioned Tories such as Sir Walter Scott clearly understood. It blinded William Gladstone, son of the middle-cla.s.s Scottish diaspora, who destroyed the Liberal Party when his plan for Home Rule for Ireland provoked ma.s.sive resistance not only from the British and Ulster Protestants, but from the Irish themselves. It blinded future British governments when the pa.s.sion for independence struck other parts of the empire: in Afrikaaner South Africa in the 1890s; in India in the 1920s; and eventually, at the tail end of the twentieth century, in Scotland herself.
Of course, all this lay far in the future when Charles James Napier arrived in 1841 to take over as governor of Sind. That part of India, in what is now Pakistan, was still a dangerous and disorderly frontier, with constant wars between the local rulers and Sikh warrior bands, and between Muslims and Hindus. Napier was there to straighten it out. His father, George Napier, had been born in Edinburgh and tutored by David Hume; some of Hume"s cool, cynical view of human nature, and that of his mentor, Lord Kames, seems to have rubbed off on Charles as well. The family lived in Ireland, where his father was quartermaster of a British regiment when the Irish Revolt of 1798 broke out. Major Napier barricaded his house, armed his five sons with muskets, and held the place as a virtual fort until help arrived.
Soldiering was in Charles Napier"s blood. As Jan Morris has said, "his cousins, forebears, and descendants commanded armies, ships, garrisons, or colonies from one end of the empire to the other." He joined the army at age twelve, and saw action in Spain under Wellington. At the battle of La Coruna he was wounded five times, including a saber cut across the head and a bayonet in the back; at Busaco he took a bullet through the face. All this did nothing to quell Napier"s thirst for excitement, but did build in him a contempt for inessentials, such as keeping up appearances, or what we call Victorian hypocrisy. His formula for empire-building was "a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards." This is what he proceeded to do in Sind.
Napier was a political radical like James Mill, with an intense sympathy for oppressed people, whether in Britain (he supported the working-cla.s.s Chartists) or in India. "How feeble is a system of iniquity!" he wrote as he watched the local rulers at work. "How weak is injustice!" The remark reminds us of the sober truth that many of the traditional regimes the British toppled, both in India and elsewhere, had spent centuries making their subjects wretchedly unhappy. When their fate hung in the balance, most of their populations would refuse to lift a finger to save them. For native peoples, the British might not be their first choice. But, in many cases, thanks to Scots like Napier, they were better than what they had.
Napier was still trying to protect the territory from marauding Sikhs when the governor-general decided to annex the entire province. It was the single biggest expansion of British rule in India in a generation, and it was hugely unpopular in Britain. Napier knew the annexation of Sind had no legal rationale, but approved of it anyway. It was, he wrote, "a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality." As governor, Napier inst.i.tuted all the reforms the old rulers never did or could. He lowered taxes, created the port of Karachi, encouraged steam navigation on the Indus River, created a police force to keep order, and proposed irrigation schemes to allow local farmers to expand their fields and crops. He changed life in Sind in other ways, as well. When he banned the Hindu practice of suttee, suttee, of burning a widow on her husband"s funeral pyre, the local Brahmin priests protested that this was interfering with an important national custom. "My nation also has a custom," Napier replied. "When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom." of burning a widow on her husband"s funeral pyre, the local Brahmin priests protested that this was interfering with an important national custom. "My nation also has a custom," Napier replied. "When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom."
Napier foretold the best of the later British Raj, with his stern but generous paternalism, which combined the rule of law with humanitarian principles-when it was feasible. The Raj system itself came into being under a Scottish governor-General James Dalhousie, Lord Ramsey. In his eight years as de facto ruler of India, from 1848 to 1856, he gave the subcontinent the trappings of a modern society. He built its first railroads, strung thousands of miles of telegraph wire, and created a national postal service. Schools, roads, and irrigation projects flourished under his tenure, while he also expanded British control over lower Burma, Oudh, and several smaller princ.i.p.alities. In each he abolished suttee suttee and and thuggee, thuggee, or the ritual murder cult, as well as the last remains of human sacrifice. or the ritual murder cult, as well as the last remains of human sacrifice.
Dalhousie also pushed for what he called a "social revolution" in the Indian att.i.tude toward women. This marked a new departure for Scots. Scottish society had always been highly patriarchal; the Scottish Enlightenment was an almost exclusively male enterprise. But the degraded status of Indian women, like that of Chinese women, shocked everyone who had contact with it. "The degradation of their women has been adhered to by Hindus and Mohammadans more tenaciously than other customs," Dalhousie wrote, "and the change will do more towards civilising the body of society than anything else could effect." He wrote laws banning child marriage, polygamy, and the practice of killing unwanted female children. He created the first schools for girls, arguing that nothing was "likely to lead to more important and beneficial consequences than the introduction of education for their female children." By the time he left India in 1856, Dalhousie had made more changes in Indian society than it had seen in centuries-more, in fact, than it could stomach.
Native resentment against Dalhousie"s self-confident paternalism and the sweeping changes he implemented exploded in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A Scot"s progressive reforms had ignited the revolt; two Scottish soldiers, Generals Colin Campbell and Hugh Rose, stamped it out. The mutiny, which convulsed the entire subcontinent for two years, marked a watershed in Anglo-Indian relations and destroyed whatever independence was left to its native rulers. But it also demonstrated the dual nature of the new British Empire: when its high-minded reforms were blocked or threatened, it would not hesitate to use brute military force to get its way. And Scots were the mainstays of both.
India"s role within the Empire had changed also. It was now crucial to British policy because of one crop: opium. Opium was the single commodity the British could trade in bulk to the other great empire to the east, China. There was only one problem: opium was illegal in China.
No European who had any dealings with imperial China had the slightest sympathy or respect for its anti-opium policy. European and British merchants knew many of the imperial officials were opium addicts themselves, who turned a blind eye to the illegal trade in exchange for a cut of the profits. They knew, too, that the same officials also unmercifully squeezed the Chinese hongs hongs or merchants, who were officially licensed to trade with "the round-eyed devils." This kept profits low on all legal exports from China, such as porcelain, silk, and, most important of all, tea. Most British traders saw smuggling Indian opium as a fitting revenge on a government that made doing business in China a misery. But two men, and two only, saw the true potential of the opium market in China, and had the skill and determination to do something about it. or merchants, who were officially licensed to trade with "the round-eyed devils." This kept profits low on all legal exports from China, such as porcelain, silk, and, most important of all, tea. Most British traders saw smuggling Indian opium as a fitting revenge on a government that made doing business in China a misery. But two men, and two only, saw the true potential of the opium market in China, and had the skill and determination to do something about it.
James Matheson came from the Sutherland branch of the Matheson clan, which dominated the lands in the western Highlands around Loch Alsh. He was working for a Scottish trading firm in Calcutta when he met William Jardine, a shrewd, hardheaded32 Lowlander and former Royal Navy surgeon who had become involved in trade as well. Together they realized the place to make money was in opium; they became partners in 1827, and within a decade Jardine Matheson and Company was the dominant force in the illegal China trade. Lowlander and former Royal Navy surgeon who had become involved in trade as well. Together they realized the place to make money was in opium; they became partners in 1827, and within a decade Jardine Matheson and Company was the dominant force in the illegal China trade.
Their skill and ingenuity in exploiting the immense Chinese drug market reflected the hard side of the Scottish character. Matheson and Jardine knew Britain had no drug problem, except for a few eccentric English intellectuals such as Samuel Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey; neither did India, which had been growing the stuff for thousands of years. If the Chinese government could not control their own people and their seemingly insatiable appet.i.te for it (one estimate put the number of Chinese opium addicts at nearly 1 percent of the total population, perhaps as many as two million persons), Jardine and Matheson believed, that was their lookout. They also grasped that the imperial system was on its last legs. Once China had been a model of civilized commercial society to Scottish scholars such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Now, to Britons trained to look with James Mill"s disdainful eye, it looked corrupt, decadent, and barbaric. The Chinese Empire was dying. Jardine and Matheson intended to be in on the kill.
Besides, smuggling was a long-standing Scottish tradition. The Jardine-Matheson cartel simply raised it to a new sophisticated level. They sailed their fast clipper ships into Whampoa harbor under the eyes of the Chinese authorities and smaller boats up the rivers to China"s princ.i.p.al cities. Jardine also brought in a 115-ton steamer, which he named-naturally-the Jardine, Jardine, to sail the Pearl River between Canton and Macao. On its first voyage the Chinese opened fire on it and forced it to reverse course. Jardine was furious. Earlier he had warned the British government that the conflicts over the opium trade could lead to full-scale war unless it persuaded the Chinese to give way. "Nor indeed should our valuable commerce and revenue both in India and Great Britain be permitted to remain subject to a caprice. . . ." The outcome of such a war, he wrote, "could not be doubted." In other words, total defeat of the imperial government and the final opening of China to the West. to sail the Pearl River between Canton and Macao. On its first voyage the Chinese opened fire on it and forced it to reverse course. Jardine was furious. Earlier he had warned the British government that the conflicts over the opium trade could lead to full-scale war unless it persuaded the Chinese to give way. "Nor indeed should our valuable commerce and revenue both in India and Great Britain be permitted to remain subject to a caprice. . . ." The outcome of such a war, he wrote, "could not be doubted." In other words, total defeat of the imperial government and the final opening of China to the West.
The First Opium War, as it was called, was the premeditated project of three men: William Jardine, British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, and the second Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty.33 Together they cooked up the war to save the opium trade and make Britain the arbiter of political fortunes in China. Once again the technological gap between West and non-West came to the rescue, this time in the form of a steam-powered iron gunboat called the Together they cooked up the war to save the opium trade and make Britain the arbiter of political fortunes in China. Once again the technological gap between West and non-West came to the rescue, this time in the form of a steam-powered iron gunboat called the Nemesis. Nemesis.
The Scottish shipbuilder John Laird constructed her in his yards at Liverpool. She was 184 feet long and powered by two sixty-horsepower engines. She carried two large thirty-two-pound cannon and five sixpounders, and a Congreve rocket launcher. Laird had also divided her hull into watertight compartments, to prevent any waterline damage from sinking her. The Nemesis Nemesis was a formidable fighting machine, the ancestor not only of ironclads such as the was a formidable fighting machine, the ancestor not only of ironclads such as the Monitor, Monitor, but of the later modern cruisers and battleships of the Royal Navy. but of the later modern cruisers and battleships of the Royal Navy.
The Nemesis Nemesis left Portsmouth on March 28, 1840. It was the first iron ship to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. When it reached Macao in November, it was the most powerful warship in the China Sea. Twice the size of ordinary Chinese war junks, it turned their wooden hulls and masts to matchsticks when it turned its guns on them. In addition, the gunboat had a draft of only six feet, so that it could sail up any navigable river to wreak havoc on the hapless Chinese. In a single afternoon"s battle up the Whampoa, the left Portsmouth on March 28, 1840. It was the first iron ship to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. When it reached Macao in November, it was the most powerful warship in the China Sea. Twice the size of ordinary Chinese war junks, it turned their wooden hulls and masts to matchsticks when it turned its guns on them. In addition, the gunboat had a draft of only six feet, so that it could sail up any navigable river to wreak havoc on the hapless Chinese. In a single afternoon"s battle up the Whampoa, the Nemesis Nemesis took out nine war junks, five forts, one artillery battery, and two military supply posts. Its captain wrote exultingly to John Laird: "It is with great pleasure I inform you that your vessel is as much admired by our own countrymen as she is dreaded by the Chinese." The British commander in charge of the operation wrote that it proved "that the British flag can be displayed throughout their inner waters wherever and whenever it is thought proper by us, against any defence or mode [the Chinese] may adopt to prevent it." took out nine war junks, five forts, one artillery battery, and two military supply posts. Its captain wrote exultingly to John Laird: "It is with great pleasure I inform you that your vessel is as much admired by our own countrymen as she is dreaded by the Chinese." The British commander in charge of the operation wrote that it proved "that the British flag can be displayed throughout their inner waters wherever and whenever it is thought proper by us, against any defence or mode [the Chinese] may adopt to prevent it."
By the next year the Nemesis Nemesis had been joined by other steamships and gunboats, including her sister, the 510-ton had been joined by other steamships and gunboats, including her sister, the 510-ton Phlegethon. Phlegethon. Together they pounded the imperial Chinese forces into submission. The Chinese government signed a peace treaty at Nanking in August 1842, finally opening up the opium trade and other commercial exchanges with Britain. Jardine became the Together they pounded the imperial Chinese forces into submission. The Chinese government signed a peace treaty at Nanking in August 1842, finally opening up the opium trade and other commercial exchanges with Britain. Jardine became the tai-pan tai-pan of the new colony he had founded, called Hong Kong. Britain had fought the first major colonial war in East Asia and won. Other European powers would follow, but Great Britain was now the dominant political power in the region-thanks to John Laird and the Scottish drug lords. of the new colony he had founded, called Hong Kong. Britain had fought the first major colonial war in East Asia and won. Other European powers would follow, but Great Britain was now the dominant political power in the region-thanks to John Laird and the Scottish drug lords.34
II.
Some territories came under British rule through conquest, others through settlement. Canada and Australia began as integral and supportive parts of the empire; they also remained the most loyal after they gained their independence as dominions. Not coincidentially, they were also where Scots were the dominant influence.
Scotsmen had been involved in the making of Canada from its very beginnings. They had settled Nova Scotia for Scotland; later, they spread to the other Maritime Provinces as well, whose wild and desolate rocky sh.o.r.es reminded them of home (which, geologically speaking, made sense). Newfoundland served as a way station for tobacco merchant smugglers operating between Virginia and Scotland in the days before the Union. At that time Canada belonged to the French. Then, in 1759, General Wolfe and the Fraser Highlanders took the Heights of Abraham overlooking the city of Quebec, and Quebec Province, and with it the key to French Canada, fell to Great Britain.35 Wolfe"s second-in-command, General James Murray, was a Scot who became its first British governor. Wolfe"s second-in-command, General James Murray, was a Scot who became its first British governor.
Canada"s main value to Europeans was its fur trade, and within a few years the Scots dominated that as well. The best traders and trappers tended to come from Scotland"s northern islands the Orkneys. The Orcadians, as they were called, enjoyed many advantages over their English counterparts. Canada"s bitterly frigid climate, the deep isolation of months in icebound inlets and rivers, and the ceaseless work in cold and wet posed no hardship for them. The standard joke was that the Orkneymen joined the Hudson"s Bay Company in order to get warm. One of the company"s factors admitted, "The Orkneymen are the quietest servants and the best adapted for this country than can be procured." Another, on a trip in 1779, said, "A set of the best men I ever saw together, as they are obliging, hardy, good canoe men." They earned the respect of the Native Americans as well. Yet Orcadians were also notorious for their secretiveness, their reluctance to betray emotion, and their keenness to enrich themselves. One English officer asked that he be recalled to England "if any person from the Orkney Isles be placed over me." Their finest tribute comes from the American historian Bernard de Voto, who said the Canada Orkneymen "pulled the wilderness round them like a cloak, and wore its beauty like a crest."
They and their Highland cousins virtually took over the Hudson"s Bay Company, so that by the turn of the eighteenth century four out of five employees were Scots. "The country is overrun with Scotchmen," an English trader complained.
Then, in 1782, another Scot, Simon MacTavish, created the Northwest Company, operating out of Montreal. MacTavish"s employees trapped beaver, otter, and seal, or hired those who did, up and down Quebec and Ontario, and built settlements west into the Red River valley. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old trapper from the Isle of Lewis named Alexander MacKenzie, set up a fur-trading post with his cousin on Lake Athabasca, in what is now Alberta. A large river flowed out of Athabasca to the north at Fort Chipewyan, near their log-cabin post. MacKenzie decided to see where it went. In 1789, the year Parisians besieged the Bastille and George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States, the trapper set out on a three-thousand-mile trek up what is now the Mackenzie River, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Four years later MacKenzie found a pa.s.sage through the Canadian Rockies and, on July 22, 1793, crossed what is now British Columbia to find himself facing the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark usually get the credit for first crossing the North American continent to the Pacific. In fact, that honor belongs to Alexander MacKenzie, who did it ten years earlier.
In 1821 the Hudson"s Bay Company and the Northwest Company merged, forming the largest corporate landholder in the world-more than 3 million square miles, from the American border to the Arctic Circle. Its Scottish president, George Simpson, governed ten times more territory than had the Roman emperors. Simpson was a West Highlander, with a strong sense of his own dignity and command. An eyewitness remembered watching him on the move: When he went out of doors he wore a black beaver hat worth forty shillings. When traveling in a canoe or boat . . . he still wore his beaver hat, but it was protected by an oiled silk cover and over his black frock coat he wore a long cloak made of Royal Stuart tartan lined with scarlet or blue bath coating.
Simpson also traveled with his own bagpiper, who would play long pibrochs for his master as they canoed across an icy transparent lake to the next trading post or Indian village.
Simpson was also a master of handling men, and the company"s Native American allies. He stopped the rum trade with local Indian tribes, and resorted to legitimate exchange to get his beaver pelts. By contrast to the American frontier, the Canadian version involved no violent confrontations with native peoples, no ma.s.sacres or reprisals. Instead it witnessed one hundred years of virtually unbroken peace and order. Simpson"s active and evenhanded stewardship of the Hudson Bay lands formed the basic core of what would become modern Canada.
Scots arrived as settlers, as well. Hundreds of Loyalist refugees from the Mohawk Valley in New York moved into eastern Ontario, in what is now Glengarry. They were soon joined by hundreds of Highland cousins, fleeing the Clearances. Today the land is flat, a checkerboard of fertile cornfields and grain silos. Then it was almost entirely forest, which the hardy Highlanders cut down and shipped to Quebec. Many stayed with the lumber business and followed it into northern Ontario, down to Michigan and Minnesota, and across to British Columbia. They became the Glengarry "shantymen," the most skilled lumberjacks in North America, artists with the ax and saw.
The rest stayed to farm, making Glengarry County, Ontario, the largest Gaelic-speaking community in the world outside Scotland. "Go not to Glengarry if you be not a Highlandman," warned one publication for prospective Scottish emigrants in 1829. Twenty years later the census revealed that one of every six of the county"s 17,500 residents was surnamed either MacDonnell or MacDonald.
Other Highlanders settled the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie in Elgin County, named after Canada"s most famous Scottish governor-general. John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, was born and grew up on one of these farms. The Galbraiths had come over from Argyllshire, like many of their neighbors, and years later Galbraith remembered the intense concentration of Scots in Dunwich Township: "Beginning at the Currie Road were first the McPhails, and Grahams, then more Grahams, the MacFarlanes, the McKellar property, Camerons, Morrisons, Gows, Galbraiths, McCallums, more McPhails, more Morrisons, Pattersons, and among others the MacLeods."
Life in Dunwich Township followed very much the pattern of life in Highland clan bailtean. bailtean. The people were frugal, hot-tempered, p.r.o.ne to fight and drink heavily, but scrupulously honest. "No houses were ever locked," Galbraith remembered, "perhaps partly because there was little in them to steal." They paid little attention to ordinary rules about personal hygiene or polite conduct. The only important distinction was who made the most money-but that conveyed respect rather than social status. In keeping with the Scottish stereotype, no one parted with their money very easily; as Galbraith puts it, "they believed a man could love his money without being a miser." Those who truly were misers, and left their houses in disrepair and their families in rags, were generally despised: but when their names came up, locals would refer to them as being "very Scotch." The people were frugal, hot-tempered, p.r.o.ne to fight and drink heavily, but scrupulously honest. "No houses were ever locked," Galbraith remembered, "perhaps partly because there was little in them to steal." They paid little attention to ordinary rules about personal hygiene or polite conduct. The only important distinction was who made the most money-but that conveyed respect rather than social status. In keeping with the Scottish stereotype, no one parted with their money very easily; as Galbraith puts it, "they believed a man could love his money without being a miser." Those who truly were misers, and left their houses in disrepair and their families in rags, were generally despised: but when their names came up, locals would refer to them as being "very Scotch."
The opening of the interior of Canada was also a largely Scottish enterprise. In 1834 John MacLeod reached the headwaters of the Sitkine River, and in 1847 Alexander Murray built Fort Yukon on the Yukon River. Two Scottish employees of the Hudson"s Bay Company did the first complete survey of the Arctic coastline between 1837 and 1854. However, the greatest transformation of Canada came when John MacDonald launched the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, connecting the country from Atlantic to Pacific. It was one of the largest public-private joint ventures in history. Scots dominated the syndicate to promote its construction, from Donald Smith and his cousin George Stephen of the Bank of Montreal to London banker John Rose. Its princ.i.p.al engineer was also a Scot, Sandford Fleming.
The building of the 3,700 mile Canadian Pacific was an epic achievement worthy of Thomas Telford. It defied obstacles and challenges as forbidding as anything the Americans faced with their transcontinental railroad. Fleming and his surveyors, engineers, and road crews had to lay track along nine hundred miles of bottomless muskeg, across the empty prairies of Manitoba and Alberta, and into the steep foothills of the Canadian Rockies. The place where Fleming decided to cross the Rockies was at Kicking Horse Pa.s.s. He and his men had to battle temperatures that plunged to thirty and forty degrees below zero, in addition to treacherous snowslides and hurricane-force winds.
When the last spike went in at Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885, Prime Minister John MacDonald arrived by train for the ceremony. The Canadian Pacific was his proudest achievement. It united the country geographically much as MacDonald had united it politically.
It was a Scottish governor-general, Lord Elgin,36 who first opened the door to the independence of British North America, as Canada was then called. Governor-General Elgin carried out reforms similar to those of other Scottish colonial administrators. He abolished the remnants of feudal land tenure left over from the French and built up Canada"s education system. He signed a reciprocity agreement with the United States in 1854, putting an end to the enmity and tension between the two halves of North America, which extended back to the American Revolution. who first opened the door to the independence of British North America, as Canada was then called. Governor-General Elgin carried out reforms similar to those of other Scottish colonial administrators. He abolished the remnants of feudal land tenure left over from the French and built up Canada"s education system. He signed a reciprocity agreement with the United States in 1854, putting an end to the enmity and tension between the two halves of North America, which extended back to the American Revolution.
He also warned his superiors that if London did not consider granting Canadians some form of self-government, they might throw in their lot with the Americans. If London gave them independence, however, Elgin believed, Canadians might actually want to strengthen their ties to Britain. He proved right. And without knowing it, Elgin had enunciated the principle on which the future British Commonwealth was based: that if a former colony was given the choice, it would prefer to remain a.s.sociated with Great Britain than try to go it alone.37 The man who guided Canada through the crucial steps to independence was John MacDonald. Born in Glasgow of Highland parents, he had emigrated with them to Kingston, Ontario, in 1820. "I had no boyhood," he wrote later. He had to make his own living at age fifteen, but eventually sc.r.a.ped together enough money to get himself a law degree. Lawyering led to politics, which in Canada meant rough-and-tumble provincial politics, with bitter enmities pitting liberals against Tories, Presbyterians against Episcopalians, French Canadians against English-speakers, and everybody against the Americans. Tough, hard-tempered, addicted to cigars and whisky, MacDonald was deeply contemptuous of the English. "There is no place in Canadian government," he wrote, "for overwashed Englishmen, who are utterly ignorant of the country and full of crochets as all Englishmen are." But he also knew his dream of a united, independent Canada would never come true unless someone brought the French Catholics and English-speaking Protestants together. So his Liberal-Conservative Party, which spearheaded the independence movement, included a strong wing in French Quebec. MacDonald"s cultivation of his French-speaking allies, and respect for their grievances, helped to heal ancient wounds. It also set the governing style of Canadian prime ministers all the way down to today.
MacDonald drew up almost every one of the Quebec Resolutions, which set forth the principles for the British North America Act that the British Parliament pa.s.sed in 1867, giving Canada independence. He presided over the 1866 Confederation conference (of the ten "Founding Fathers" of the Canadian Confederation, in fact, eight, including MacDonald, were Scots) and served as Canada"s first prime minister. In that post he created the most distinctive symbol of modern Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He brought British Columbia into the confederation (completion of the Canadian Pacific was the price of admission), along with Manitoba and Prince Edward Island-and kept unhappy Nova Scotia from leaving.
MacDonald"s successor was also a native-born Scot, Alexander Mackenzie. By the turn of the century, Scots and persons of Scottish descent were virtually running the country. One-third of Canada"s business elite was of Scottish origin, and Scots single-handedly ran entire industries, such as papermaking (as usual), iron and steel, oil and gas, and the fur trade. They also enjoyed a lock on Canadian higher education. An author wrote in 1896, "There is not a college or university in Canada, where at least one "son of the heather" is not to be found in some high capacity." Schools such as Dalhousie University (founded in 1818), McGill University (1821), and the University of Toronto (founded in 1827 by another Scot, James Strachan) enshrined the basic principles of Scottish education and the two great exponents of commonsense philosophy, Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart.
The Canadian who best exhibited the key virtues of the Scottish mind and what it could do, however was the Canadian Pacific"s hard-driving, Scottish-born chief engineer, Sandford Fleming. As the final leg of the railroad neared completion, Fleming realized one great obstacle to the cross-continental railway"s success remained: Canada"s clocks. Like clocks everywhere in the world, they were set according to local sunrise and sunset; where the sun was in the sky at any given moment determined what time it was.
This meant that everyone"s local time was different from everyone else"s. When it was noon in Toronto, it was 12:25 in Montreal, and 11:58 in Hamilton. In the United States alone, there were more than one hundred different standard times. People had learned to live with this constant disparity since they first began telling time. Even the advent of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, which increasingly made counting the hours and minutes more accurate, did nothing to help. In a horse-drawn age, when distances to be traveled were small and trips infrequent, a variation of ten or fifteen minutes, even an hour or two, did not matter much. But now it caused ma.s.s confusion for railway schedules, since no one could say exactly when a train was due in at a given station: there were simply too many different answers to the same question.38 Travel was beginning to demand a level of chronological precision the world"s clocks could no longer provide. Travel was beginning to demand a level of chronological precision the world"s clocks could no longer provide.
So Sandford Fleming decided to solve the problem. He took out a map of the world and divided it into twenty-four different time zones, each measuring fifteen degrees of longitude. The Americans had adopted a similar scheme for organizing their railroad timetables: now Fleming gave it a wider application than anyone had imagined. Then, for the next half-decade, he launched a one-man crusade to get first the Canadian government and then other world governments to adopt the new time zones and set their clocks according to the new single standard. Fleming was so tenacious and persuasive, and his idea so immediately sensible and useful, that he succeeded. An international conference held in Washington in 1882 confirmed the final arrangements. Finally, on November 17, 1883, clocks and watches around the world were for the first time in history synchronized according to one standard time. It laid the essential foundation for the globalization of travel, communications, and economies. When we are able to fly from New York and arrive in Rome or Singapore in time to meet a loved one, or phone a customer in San Francisco or Karachi to see if they received our shipment, we must thank Sandford Fleming.
III.
Scots made it possible for Canada to be the first British colony to receive recognition as an independent nation. They did the same for Australia, but in a different way. There they turned a brutal and disorganized colony of doomed men and women into a civilized community.
After Captain James Cook (who was born in Yorkshire of Scottish parents) first landed there in 1770, Australia sat virtually forgotten until Prime Minister William Pitt established it as the site for a British penal colony. The first fleet of convict ships, carrying one thousand prisoners, arrived at Botany Bay, just south of the future Sydney Harbour, in 1788. More than 160,000 others followed, both men and women. Some were convicted of murder and other violent crimes, and accepted transportation to New South Wales, as the colony was called, in lieu of a death sentence. But many others went there for simple cases of theft or lesser offenses. One woman had stolen her employer"s dress and was sentenced to seven years" transportation. One male prisoner, aged seventeen, stole food on board his convict ship. He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged within an hour.
Most convicts saw transportation, and the eight-month journey to Australia, as preferable to languishing in an English prison. But conditions were harsh and the work brutal. Prisoners were a.s.signed to whatever kind of work their keepers wished, and contracted out, like slaves, to free settlers, who grew rich on the cheap labor. Beatings were common, sometimes to the point of death, as were hangings. One warder remembered a prisoner who had been flogged so often his back "appeared quite bare of flesh," while his collarbones were exposed "like two Ivory polished horns." It was, the warden said, "with some difficulty we could find another place to flog him."
What sustained convicts through all this s.a.d.i.s.tic brutality was the possibility that after working four years of a seven-year sentence, or six of a fourteen-year one, you could earn your release. New South Wales offered lots of cheap, arable land, a healthy climate, and a future-if you got your certificate of emanc.i.p.ation. Even then, the free settlers still treated freed prisoners with suspicion and disdain. The slightest complaint might mean rearrest and more hard labor.
At the turn of the eighteenth century Australia was a hard, vicious, ugly place. Two Scots came to change that, in two contrasting ways: one by altering Australia"s economy, the other by reforming its way of life.
John MacArthur arrived at Botany Bay with the second fleet of transported prisoners, to serve as lieutenant in the local army garrison. He was tough and violent-tempered, with an animal magnetism and a shrewd nose for a business deal. He might have given tai-pans tai-pans William Jardine and James Matheson a run for their money. MacArthur bought a farm for himself of 250 acres and began raising wheat and sheep. He also organized an illicit rum-running ring with other officers in the garrison. One day he fought a duel with his own colonel and wounded him in the shoulder. Sent back to England for court-martial, MacArthur turned the tables on his enemies. He won an acquittal, and brought back a brace of long-haired merino sheep he somehow secured from King George III"s private stock, and a special royal grant of two thousand acres of land to set up a sheep farm, which he called Camden. William Jardine and James Matheson a run for their money. MacArthur bought a farm for himself of 250 acres and began raising wheat and sheep. He also organized an illicit rum-running ring with other officers in the garrison. One day he fought a duel with his own colonel and wounded him in the shoulder. Sent back to England for court-martial, MacArthur turned the tables on his enemies. He won an acquittal, and brought back a brace of long-haired merino sheep he somehow secured from King George III"s private stock, and a special royal grant of two thousand acres of land to set up a sheep farm, which he called Camden.
MacArthur began experimenting, crossing the valuable but finicky merino with the Bengal sheep and the so-called Fat-Tail breed from South Africa. The hybrid he produced became the foundation of the Australian wool industry. Within a decade he and his wife and son had set up the first Australian sheep run or ranch, which became so successful that it grew to almost sixty thousand acres. To this day, the essential bloodlines of Australian sheep-breeding trace their origins to Camden Farm.39 MacArthur was also a compulsive meddler in New South Wales politics. When the new English military governor, William Bligh of Bounty Bounty mutiny fame, arrived in 1805, he found MacArthur"s high-handed ways intolerable, and ordered him arrested. From his prison cell MacArthur plotted Bligh"s downfall. His accomplice in the rum-running cartel and fellow Scot George Johnstone kidnapped Bligh at gunpoint and set him on a ship to England. For two years MacArthur, Johnstone, and a military junta ran New South Wales, rewarding cronies and terrorizing enemies. The colony had clearly reached a crisis. At last the British government recognized the need for serious reform, and dispatched the man who could set Australia straight. mutiny fame, arrived in 1805, he found MacArthur"s high-handed ways intolerable, and ordered him arrested. From his prison cell MacArthur plotted Bligh"s downfall. His accomplice in the rum-running cartel and fellow Scot George Johnstone kidnapped Bligh at gunpoint and set him on a ship to England. For two years MacArthur, Johnstone, and a military junta ran New South Wales, rewarding cronies and terrorizing enemies. The colony had clearly reached a crisis. At last the British government recognized the need for serious reform, and dispatched the man who could set Australia straight.
Lachlan Macquarie had served nearly twenty years in the 73rd Highlanders in India and the Middle East, when he learned that the post of governor of Australia had fallen vacant. He lobbied hard for it, and in the summer of 1809 he set out on the journey to Sydney. He arrived in January, to find the colony "in most ruinous decay." The houses and government buildings were a shambles; the Government Advocate"s house was, as he put it, "a perfect pigstye." Sydney"s three churches were tents pitched on vacant lots. The main street was a dirt road, rutted and filled with animal excrement. Morale among prisoners and warders alike was at an all-time low, and drunkenness at an all-time high.
Macquarie was a hardheaded, clear-eyed workhorse, with a military man"s sense of order, a martinet"s sense of discipline, and a Scotsman"s sense of fairness and justice. In Robert Hughes"s words, "In guts, moral vigor, and paternal even-handedness, as well as in his bouts of self-righteousness and bull-headed vanity," Macquarie had few equals, even among other Scottish colonial officials. He banned the trade in rum, and ordered Sydney"s bars closed during religious services on Sunday. He made church attendance compulsory for all convicts, and set up Sunday schools for the local children.
Even more important, Macquarie realized the key to keeping order in the colony was to treat the convicts as men and women, rather than as beasts of burden. He argued to his superiors in London that "emanc.i.p.ation" was "the greatest inducement that can be held out to the Reformation of Manners of the Inhabitants." He met every arriving convict ship personally and reminded the prisoners that while they had an obligation to obey their warders and employers, they also had rights. He would tell them "what a fine fruitful country they are come to," remembered one convict who first saw Macquarie standing on the dock with the medical examiner and garrison commander, "and what he will do for them if their conduct merits it."
Macquarie set most of the convicts, almost two-thirds of the skilled ones, to sprucing up Sydney. They cleared away the garbage, put a proper road through the center of town, rebuilt the government buildings, and built permanent churches as well as schools, houses, hospitals, and squares. One of Macquarie"s prisoners turned out to be a former student of the celebrated Regency architect John Nash. Macquarie"s wife had brought with her a book of buildings and town designs. Like James Craig laying out Edinburgh"s New Town, the trio not only redesigned Sydney, but also constructed a series of townships in the surrounding territory, all in the metropolitan neocla.s.sical style Robert Adam had established and Nash had embellished.
Macquarie also expanded the colony from its now-overcrowded enclave. He encouraged his team of cartographers and explorers to push north of Sydney, where they found the great fertile Liverpool Plains in 1818, and southwest into what is now Victoria. He contracted sixty convicts to build a road across the Blue Mountains, which locals and aborigines said were impa.s.sable. If they could do it in six months, he told them, they would be free. The convicts built the entire route, all 126 miles of it, in the time allotted, and Macquarie was as good as his word. It was proof, he told his superiors, of what could be accomplished by using incentives instead of coercion, through the work of free men rather than slave labor-the same point Adam Smith had made in the Wealth of Nations Wealth of Nations nearly forty years earlier. nearly forty years earlier.
Macquarie raised the quality of life in Sydney even as he cut costs. He even tried to find ways to a.s.similate Australia"s aborigines into the new community he was creating. However, his fair-minded treatment of the convicts, and his insistence that "emanc.i.p.ated" workers receive the same rights and benefits as other citizens of Sydney, grated on locals who were used to having their own way with convict labor (among them, it must be admitted, John MacArthur). Eventually they turned his superiors against him, and Macquarie, worn out and disappointed, returned to England in 1821. He had served longer than any other governor in Australia"s short history, almost eleven years. His successor, yet another Scot named Thomas Brisbane, was sent to reimpose the harsh discipline of the pre-Macquarie days. But he soon discovered this was impossible. Change had caught up with the penal colony, and the Emanc.i.p.ants, as freed convicts were called, were now embedded in the fabric of New South Wales society.
So instead Brisbane expanded many of Macquarie"s reforms, permitted freedom of the press, encouraged the planting of tobacco and sugar cane, and expanded voluntary emigration into Australia. Then he, too, ran afoul of the local landowners and was recalled. A series of English governors temporarily brought back the floggings and brutal discipline. But when, in 1840, the Edinburgh-born naval officer and former professor of geography Alexander Maconochie took over Norfolk Island, the penal colony"s own penal colony where the most recalcitrant prisoners were sent, it signaled the beginning of the end of the old system. Liberals in Parliament had already recommended abolishing transportation. Maconochie"s humane and farsighted reforms, which included setting up a prison library (with a complete set of Scott"s Waverly novels) and forming an orchestra, proved that prisons could go beyond a harsh system of punishment and discipline, even with the hardest cases. Genuine penal reform in Britain was still a generation away. But finally London stopped the convict ships in 1867-the same year Canada became the first British Dominion.
By the 1880s Australia had the fastest-growing economy and the highest per capita income in the world. Scots were as active in every major aspect of Australian life, including business, education, religion, and farming-almost 40 percent of Australia"s borrowed capital came from Scottish banks-as they were in New Zealand.40 MacArthur"s sheep produced its princ.i.p.al export, wool. Queensland and South Australia now hosted large-scale settlements (including Brisbane, named after Macquarie"s successor), with emigrants flooding into the country, among them a quarter of a million Scots. One of them, ironically enough, was the son of Alistair McDonnell of Glengarry. Despite the old man"s brutal clearances, the burden of debt still fell heavily on his son and heir, Anaeas. Finally, in 1840, Anaeas MacDonnell had had enough. He sold his remaining estates except a tiny section of Knoydart, and emigrated to New South Wales with his family, his servants, several bolts of tartan, a couple of prefabricated timber houses, and his piper. He set out for the South Land to start a new life-as a sheep farmer. MacArthur"s sheep produced its princ.i.p.al export, wool. Queensland and South Australia now hosted large-scale settlements (including Brisbane, named after Macquarie"s successor), with emigrants flooding into the country, among them a quarter of a million Scots. One of them, ironically enough, was the son of Alistair McDonnell of Glengarry. Despite the old man"s brutal clearances, the burden of debt still fell heavily on his son and heir, Anaeas. Finally, in 1840, Anaeas MacDonnell had had enough. He sold his remaining estates except a tiny section of Knoydart, and emigrated to New South Wales with his family, his servants, several bolts of tartan, a couple of prefabricated timber houses, and his piper. He set out for the South Land to start a new life-as a sheep farmer.41
III.
Africa was the last populated continent to be explored and penetrated by the British or any Europeans. It was called "the Dark Continent" because it was shrouded in mystery. No one knew what its vast interior held, or what people or riches might be found there. All trade and contact was through African middlemen. The mosquito-infested coast and disease-ridden swamps and jungles barred any European from probing farther. Working for the Royal African Company, or serving in a British garrison in Sierra Leone or the Cape Coast Command, which monitored Britain"s ban on the slave trade, was for a European the equivalent of a death sentence. When Scottish missionary Mungo Park tried to lead an expedition up the Niger in 1805, every European on the trip died. Two-thirds of the British soldiers who landed on the Gold Coast between 1823 and 1827 died of diseases ranging from malaria and dysentery to sleeping sickness and yellow fever. In 1824 alone, 221 out of 224 perished. Africa truly was "the white man"s graveyard," a permanent enigma sealed off from curious or prying European eyes.
The first person to challenge this accepted view was the shipbuilder"s son MacGregor Laird. He believed the steam-powered boats his family firm was starting to build could be used to explore West Africa"s great Niger River, from its mouth at the Bight of Benin up the channel and deep into the interior. Europeans, he believed, could then trade directly for raw materials with the natives, bring them manufactured goods in exchange-and spread the word of Christianity to Africa"s heathen ma.s.ses. Steam, he wrote to Lord Grey, "will convert a most uncertain and precarious trade into a regular and steady one, diminish the risk of life, and free a large portion of capital at present engaged in it." In 1832 Laird set up his company for commercial development of the Niger and took two steamboats to Africa. The venture failed. Of forty-eight Europeans who started out on his first voyage up the Niger, only nine returned. Laird himself nearly died, and returned to England in January 1834 in a feeble state-indeed, his health never recovered. But he persevered in pushing for steam power as the key to unlocking the dark secrets of Africa, and expanding the British Empire. The voyage of the Nemesis Nemesis to China six years later was the result. to China six years later was the result.
In the end, however, it was not the desire for empire or profits that finally opened up Africa, but another powerful force in the Scottish cultural repertoire-religion. A single man did it, not in order to enrich himself or to plant the Union Jack on another distant sh.o.r.e, but for the Africans themselves, to bring them education, medicine, freedom from the threat of slavery-in other words, "civilization" in enlightened Scottish terms-as well as Christianity. His name was David Livingstone, and in many ways his life epitomizes much of what made Scots so respected and influential around the world.
He was born in Blantyre in 1818, eight miles from Glasgow, to a family of mill workers. His grandfather Neil, a crofter on the tiny island of Ulva in the Inner Hebrides, had been driven from the family farm during the Clearances, and had found work in Blantyre"s cotton mill. The son learned to read and write and became a clerk in the same factory, and then made a precarious living as a traveling tea salesman. David Livingstone grew up in a one-room tenement house on Shuttle Row, as it was called. Since the family needed every penny it could sc.r.a.pe together, David started work himself in the factory at age ten, climbing under the huge steam-driven looms to repair broken threads. According to an early biographer, a Blantyre neighbor remembered the Livingstone boys, David and Charles, coming from work. "If they was walkin" along the road and cam" tae a puddle, Charlie wud walk roon, but Dauvid-he"d stamp right through."
After fourteen hours of hard labor in the factory, David Livingstone attended night cla.s.ses to get the education he craved. He spent his first paycheck on a Latin grammar. By the time he was fourteen he had learned Latin and Greek, and mastered stacks of theological literature. His father was a Calvinist Congregationalist who distributed religious tracts as he sold tea, so it is not surprising that religion was a powerful force in the son"s life. But it had also become a resurgent force in Scotland.
For fifty years after the Moderates had defeated the Evangelical party for control of the Scottish Kirk in 1757, Scottish culture had secularized itself and become "enlightened" on matters of religion. Dugald Stewart, Henry Brougham, James Mill, even Sir Walter Scott, all treated most of the history of organized Christianity, particularly in Scotland, as one of superst.i.tion and intolerance. Then, with the new century, Protestant evangelism experienced a powerful rebound. Part of it was a reaction against the atheism of the French Revolution. Part of it, too, was the rebellion against an established Church of Scotland that had become so refined and aloof from everyday life that it offered nothing to people who needed a strong emotional outlet. Just as American Presbyterians had caught religious fire from Scottish Evangelicals in the eighteenth century, setting off the Great Revival, so Scottish and English Calvinists now turned to American revivalism for a new kind of "religion of the people."
The country went through an unabashed phase of being "born again." Protestant sects such as the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists found eager converts among Scotland"s rural and urban workers. Shops, taverns, even most city services, strictly observed the Sabbath-a custom that persisted until very recently. Church leaders such as Thomas Chalmers became civic leaders in the fight against poverty and slum conditions. Eventually the revivalist tide swept over the Kirk itself. In 1843 nearly 450 ministers resigned their offices and joined with Chalmers in forming the new "Free Protesting Church of Scotland," or the Free Kirk, an evangelical alternative to Scotland"s government-subsidized church.
However, this resolute, churchgoing, Sabbath-keeping, psalm-singing Scotland stayed in line with this modernizing predecessor. No one wanted to turn back the clock or reverse the accomplishments of the past hundred years. Instead, the new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and "civilization." As the young David Livingstone discovered when he read the works of the Scottish astronomer and theologian Thomas d.i.c.k, science and religion were parallel paths to revealing G.o.d"s truth. In other words, the thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other. The G.o.d of nature and the G.o.d of Revelation were one. "In the glow of love which Christianity inspires," Livingstone remembered years later, "I resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of misery"-both as a missionary and as a doctor.
Livingstone took up studies in chemistry and theology at Anderson College at the University of Glasgow. At twenty-three he was older than most of the students, but he was as keen and alert as the best-who were very, very good. One of his cla.s.smates in Thomas Graham"s chemistry cla.s.s was William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, who would become the most influential chemist of the nineteenth century. Another was Lloyd (later Lord) Playfair, grandson of the brilliant mathematician.
In 1838 he had his medical degree, and he hoped to go to China to open a mission there. However, the outbreak of "that abominable Opium War" forced him change his plans. Then he met Englishman Robert Moffat, who gave a lecture in Glasgow on the mission he had just opened in southern Africa. As Moffat told his audience of the vastness of the African continent and its unexplored beauty, of rising in the morning to see "the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before," the image stuck in Livingstone"s mind. Here was a chance not only to do the Lord"s work but to embark on a great adventure, an opportunit