Scotland had already had a religious revolution. By an irony which seems also a law of history, the new religion of Calvinism, like Marxism today, ha… - Hugh Trevor-Roper

England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus.

The Government spokesmen...insist that, once the assembly is established, the SNP will wither away... Thanks to the assembly, Scotch nationalism will have been scotched. The leaders of the SNP do not agree with this reasoning. If they did, they would oppose the assembly as an unacceptable substitute for their own essential demands, a stone offered instead of bread. In fact they have decided to vote for the assembly, confident that they can use it as a stepping-stone towards their own objective. For after all, they can say, the opportunities of making trouble in the assembly will be many. There can be disputes over the spending of the money, disputes over the restraints on the assembly, both political and financial. Even practical incompetence can be useful; for in every case the blame can be concentrated on a very convenient scapegoat, the reserved powers of Westminster. In this way the assembly, which has been devised to halt the advance of the SNP, will be an excellent means of accelerating that advance: an advance far beyond the limited aims of the government: an advance to sovereignty.

After that date , intelligent Scotchmen rejoiced in the removal of their national politics to London. That enabled them to get on with the long delayed improvement of their country which, till then, had remained, as they admitted, "the rudest of all the European nations". In the eighteenth century, the energy which had hitherto been wasted or frustrated in futile politics was devoted to "improvement" and the rudest of its nations became the admired model of Europe.