It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had
the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn
soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their
liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best
known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the
chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.
But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the
sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the
monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there
were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable
excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it
was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into
Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country,
any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that
Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a
Constable to France, a General-in-Chief to Russia and still again a
Lieutenant to Gustavus Adolphus. If evidence were needed of the vigor
of the Scottish race, it is readily forthcoming in the fact that for
five hundred years the Land O'Cakes enriched the world with the
surplus of her able men.
Nurse of heroes, nurse of martyrs, nurse of freemen, are titles which
belong of right to our Motherland and she has been justified of her
children, at home and abroad.
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