of education may on the whole be said to have justified the measure, although so far as Scotland is concerned the voluntary system had already been widely extended before the national system was introduced. There are difficulties alike in extreme centralisation and in extreme localisation of control. Since the burning of the Theatre Royal in Queen Street, Glasgow, in 1829, there had only been one theatre of consequence in Glasgow. This was the Caledonian Theatre in Dunlop Street. From about 1826 until 1851, this theatre was under the management of John Henry Alexander, a celebrated actor-manager of his time.1 I do not remember the name of his successor; but about 1863, when I saw my first Christmas pantomime on its stage, it possessed a stock company. I believe that Henry Irving was then a member of it, or had been a short time before. The starring system had, however, begun, and in the later sixties I saw in that theatre, Irving in The Bells, The Lyons Mail and Eugene Aram, and Toole in Kenny's comedy, Sweethearts and Wives. In opera I heard Titjens and Modjeska, Foley, the Irish tenor, and others whom I have forgotten. Sheridan Knowles, author of The Hunchback, lived in retirement at Rothesay in the Island of Bute. He devoted himself during his later years to propaganda against the Roman Catholic Church and to evangelistic labours. My grandmother, Mrs. Bridie, knew him, and frequently spoke to me of the impressiveness of his reading of the Bible. 1I have before me a curious little book, Stage Reminiscences. . . during the last Forty Years, by "An Old Stager" (really a stage carpenter), published in Glasgow (in a second edition) in 1870. There are many interesting anecdotes of actors and the stage between 1816 and 1851. 'He wrote a reply to Cardinal Wiseman on Transubstantiation and other controversial tracts. Knowles died in 1862. CHAPTER V SCOTLAND IN THE SEVENTIES From day to day, from year to year, I took their lectures meekly down, How well I made their thoughts my own. And thus, perhaps half-unperceived, I have become, in leaf and stem (It seems too good to be believed), A fragrant flower akin to them; And yet, I may presume to add That, thanks to kind Carnegie's pelf, The day will come, it is too bad, When I retire-into myself. T. L. DOUGLAS, "A Prof. Mixture,” in University Verses (1911) (With emendations in the four last lines). Two important events contributed to economic expansion in Scotland in the period between 1870 and 1875. These were the recovery of the United States from the exhaustion of the Civil War and the war between Germany and France in 1870-71. The first occasioned an enormous demand for railway iron and the second eliminated for a time the competition of Germany and France, especially in the textile markets. The prices of iron soared and the wages of miners and ironworkers followed. Shipbuilding was stimulated by the advance of freights and new lines of steamships were projected. Relieved of the competition of Mulhouse, the calico printers became very busy. The railway companies were able, without much grumbling from traders, to increase their rates through the addition of terminal charges. Industrial districts went full steam ahead. Advances in wages became general, affecting all industries, and migration to the towns went on at an accelerated rate. Rents advanced, quarters of towns inhabited by working people were congested, acute sanitary and engineering problems began to manifest themselves. Private enterprise found manufacture so profitable that it was disinclined to provide capital for public services, which were demanded by the increasing urban population. Public services which had in the main been left were municipalised. One of the public services, however, did not at that time attract municipal enterprise. This was urban transportation. Growth of cities, intensive and extensive, in population and area, made manifest the inadequacy of existing means of communication. No one in the municipal councils had vision enough to foresee the importance of the problem of urban transportation from a municipal point of view. No one saw that direction and character of civic development must depend largely upon facilities for movement within cities and between them and their immediate outskirts. For distances of a few miles in certain directions, railways availed, but utilisation of urban fractions of long through lines of railway for local traffic was doubtful economy from the railway point of view, and the mere fact that it was necessary sometimes for passengers to walk a greater or less distance to and from railway stations suggested that some more convenient and readily available system might be provided. Omnibuses had been introduced in large cities and had been used, together with coaches, for inter-urban traffic. Light rails, known as tramways, had been used for waggons drawn by horses and carrying minerals and merchandise; but the system had not been extensively developed even for such traffic and it had not been applied to conveyance of passengers. So far as I am aware, the first attempt to utilise the public streets for the laying of tramways and to use upon these omnibuses for the conveyance of the public was made in Paris in the sixties. The Paris experiment was not followed by any immediate developments elsewhere; but in the late sixties an eccentric American, George Francis Train, began a propaganda in favour of urban tramways. He was successful in securing some concessions from municipalities in the United States, and in obtaining capital to construct such lines there. In, I think, 1869, he crossed the Atlantic, and promoted in London the British and Foreign Tramways Company. This company succeeded in making an arrangement with the city of Glasgow, under which tramway lines were to be constructed in that city and a certain amount per mile was to be paid by the company to the city. The lines were constructed in 1870-71. I remember quite well the public י feeling upon the project at that time. The success of the enterprise was generally looked upon as very doubtful. Some people thought that if passenger traffic was insufficient to justify exclusive use of the lines for omnibuses, that the lines might be used for conveyance of goods. When the lines were opened, it began to be apparent that there was little justification for foreboding. For some years tramways did not pay; but gradually the habit of using them increased and the profitable character of the enterprise became evident. Before the lines reached a paying basis, they were purchased by a company organised by Glasgow capitalists, and the British and Foreign Company disappeared from the scene. The original lease was drawn for twenty years from 1870. At a later period it was extended by four years, so that the close of the lease came in 1894. The terms The shrewd Town Councillors thought that they had made a good bargain with the promoters. The arrangement for payment of a rental per mile of constructed line was not contingent upon any profit being made by the company, and thus the city could not incur any loss should the enterprise turn out unsuccessfully. of the lease were, however, provocative of friction between the Corporation and the company during the whole of the period of the lease. The method of payment formed a direct inducement to the company to refrain from extending its lines or to permit extension of them by the Corporation of the city, unless the estimated revenue from the extension was regarded as sufficient to pay the additional rental as well as to give increased returns to the capital of the company. Had payment to the city been based upon the profits of the company or upon its gross earnings, the city would have had to go without any payment for a few years, or would have had to be content with a small return, while in subsequent years it would have shared in the prosperity of the company. The Town Council of Glasgow in the seventies was composed of men belonging to the smaller merchantry and the smaller manufacture with a slender number of important merchants and engineers. A solitary councillor represented the Trade Unions. Few members were men of great wealth; but in general they enjoyed a comfortable income. Some of them had retired from active business. Their services to the municipality were rendered gratuitously and there was no taint of corruption. The Lord Provost was chairman of the Town Council and was elected by it from among its members. He was not regarded by the public as responsible for the policy of the Council. A tradition of rather more than ample hospitality had gathered round the civic chair, and thus the rule came to be established that none but men of ample means should be elected. When the supply of such men in the Council ran short, as it often did, it was necessary to introduce one into the Council for the purpose. The inducement of a knighthood and in more recent years of a baronetcy usually sufficed to attract a suitable candidate. The burden of civic administration did not fall either upon the Lord Provost or upon the Town Council. The administration of Glasgow at this period was essentially bureaucratic. The Town Clerk, the manager of the Water Works, the manager of the Gas Works and other technical officers were the real administrators and the real authors even of municipal policy. The Council was very reluctant to add to its obligations, and was even slow to permit itself to take the measures urged upon it through increase of population and through extension of civic boundaries, which took place in consequence of that increase. Under these conditions municipal affairs were conducted with cautious deliberation; discussion was businesslike and brief, and the proportion of their available time occupied by the members of the Council in civic business was not unduly great. The time came when these conditions were changed. The series of economic movements described above sustained a check in 1873, when owing to the railway crisis in the United States and financial difficulties on the continent of Europe, iron dropped in price and wages fell. In Scotland much of the surplus profit of the preceding period was now thrown into house building, induced by rise of rents and facilitated by the fall in wages. The West of Scotland was further affected during the three succeeding years (1873-76) by the immediate consequences of demonetisation of silver by Germany and suspension of the Latin Monetary Union. The fall in Indian exchange resulting from these events affected a wide range of industries in Glasgow. At the same moment the technique of an important group of industries-the calico printing and dyeing trades-was altered through the introduction of new chemical compounds replacing the natural products, of which mention has been made in a previous chapter. Synthetic alizarine took the place of garancine, aniline derivatives took the place of cochineal and dyewoods. A long list of chemical compounds which had been used in the processes formerly employed almost disappeared from the markets, and a new list made its appearance. Drugs which had been made in trifling quantities for medicinal purposes found uses which compelled their production on a large scale. Simultaneously with these changes there |