initiative in regard to suspected cases of sudden death, although in this respect the law of Scotland is less strict than that of England. Justices of the peace, who are unpaid and require no special qualification, but as they are recommended by the lord-lieutenant, are generally persons of position in the county, once exercised a wider subordinate jurisdiction than now devolves upon them, their chief administrative function being to act along with certain members of the county councils, as the licensing authority for public-houses in the county and in police burghs, and as a court of appeal from the decisions of the bailies in royal and parliamentary burghs.
Local Government.—The largest administrative unit is that of the county, but the areas of counties may be adapted to meet various public or political requirements. They may be altered for the purposes of the registrar-general, and for police purposes part of the area of one county may be brought into the area of another. For parliamentary purposes some counties have been united, as Clackmannan and Kinross, Elgin and Nairn, Orkney and Shetland, and Peebles and Selkirk, and others divided, as Aberdeen, Ayr, Lanark, Perth and Renfrew, while others retain in certain respects their old subdivision, Lanarkshire for assessment purposes being still partitioned into the upper, middle and lower wards. Originally the counties were synonymous either with sheriffdoms or stewartries. Stewartries ceased with the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions in 1748, though Kirkcudbrightshire still bears the designation. The counties are thirty-three in number, Ross and Cromarty constituting one, while Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee are each a county of a city. The highest county dignitary is the lord-lieutenant, the office dating from 1782. Nominated by the crown, he holds office aut vitam aut culpam, represents the crown in military matters, recommends for commissions of the peace, holds the position of high sheriff, and is a member of the standing joint committee. The office, however, is little more than honorary. In olden times there were three classes of burgh. Those created by charter directly from the Crown were styled royal burghs: they number seventy in all, of which no fewer than seventeen belong to Fifeshire. Those holding their charters from a feudal superior and not from the crown were called burghs of regality, their magistrates and council being usually appointed by the overlord or his representative. Being small and unimportant, these burghs were not affected by the act of 1833, but in 1892 were required to adopt the constitution of police burghs. Towns that received their charters from bishops were burghs of barony, their magistrates and council being appointed by the superior. When the bishop's jurisdiction was abolished, the burghs as a rule assumed the position of royal burghs. Police burghs are wholly modern, dating from the middle of the 19th century. They were called into existence by the rapid growth of certain districts caused by the development of the coal and iron fields. The principle on which they are established may be briefly stated thus: towns with a minimum population of 800 can, on a poll demanded by the ratepayers showing a majority in favour of it, acquire the status of a police burgh subject to representations from neighbouring burghs, a proviso devised to check the growth of “parasitic” burghs in the immediate vicinity of a great centre of population and industry, enjoying all the public improvements initiated by their powerful neighbour and yet contributing nothing towards the cost and upkeep of them. It should be noted that, according to Scottish usage, “police” includes drainage, the suppression of nuisances, paving, lighting and cleansing, in addition to the provision of a constabulary force, and that in point of fact, paradoxical as it appears, the bulk of the police burghs do not manage their police. Royal burghs derive part of their income from ancient corporate property known as “the Common Good” and consisting mostly of land and houses. It is devoted to objects for which the rates are not applicable. Glasgow, for example, might found a chair in the University from the Common Good but not from the rates, and Edinburgh maintains from the same source the city observatory and defrays part of the cost of the time-gun. Only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Greenock, Aberdeen and Paisley have private and local acts, conferring powers exceeding the general law, to deal with, e.g. overcrowding, the obnoxious display of advertisements, the compulsory acquisition of land for gas, water or electric-power enterprises, all the other burghs being governed by Public General Acts. This is in marked contrast with the practice in England, where almost every large borough has its own private act. The corporation of the burghs consists of the provost (or lord provost, in the cases of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee), bailies and councillors, with certain permanent officials, of whom the town clerk is the most important. The course of reform may now be concisely summarized. In 1833 Scottish burghs were for the first time entitled to be governed by directly-elected bodies, and at various times since that date fuller powers of legal self-government were granted in different directions. In 1845 parochial boards were created for relief of the poor, their powers being afterwards extended to deal with the statutes concerning burial-grounds, the registration of births, deaths and marriages, vaccination, public health, public libraries and other matters. In 1872 school boards were set up throughout the country; county councils followed in 1889 and parish councils in 1894. These reforms profoundly modified and in some cases abolished older organizations which had grown inadequate to modern wants. The Commissioners of Supply, originally appointed to apportion and collect the national revenue and afterwards entrusted with the regulation of the land tax, the control of the county police, the raising of the militia, and the levying of rates for county expenditure, were practically superseded by the county councils, which are also the local authority under the Contagious Diseases (Animals) and the Public Health Acts in all parishes (burghs and police burghs excepted), perform the administrative duties formerly entrusted to the justices of the peace, and may also enforce the Rivers Pollution Act each within its own jurisdiction. The county councils are strengthened by certain special committees, such as the secondary education committee, whose duties have already been defined, and the standing joint committee—one half appointed by the county council, the other half by the Commissioners of Supply—which manages the county police and whose consent in writing must be obtained before the county council can undertake any work involving capital outlay. All but the smallest counties are subdivided into districts, and the Road Acts and Public Health Acts are administered in these areas by district committees, composed of members of the county council for the district and one representative of each parish council within the area. The act of 1894, as we have seen, not only established the Local Government Board, consisting of the secretary for Scotland, the solicitor-general, the under-secretary and three appointed members—a vice-president, a lawyer and a medical officer of) public health—but also replaced the parochial boards by parish councils, empowered to deal among other things with poor relief, lunacy, vaccination, libraries, baths, recreation grounds, disused churchyards, rights of way, parochial endowments, and the formation of special lighting and scavenging districts.
(J. A. M.)
III. Political History.
Scotland, to political observers of the middle of the 16th century, seemed destined by nature to form one homogeneous kingdom with England. The outward frontiers of both were the sea; no difficult physical barriers divided the two territories; the majority of Scots spoke an intelligible form of English, differing from northern English more in spelling and pronunciation than in idiom and vocabulary; and after the Reformation the State religion in both countries was Protestant. Yet, in spite of these causes making for union, and in spite of the manifest advantages of union, it was by a mere dynastic accident that, in the defect of nearer heirs to the English throne, the crowns of both kingdoms were worn by James VI. (1603), while more than a century of unrest and war had to elapse before the union of England and Scotland into one kingdom in 1707. Even later there broke forth civil wars that, apart from dynastic sentiment, had no political aim except “to break the Union.” Thus for seven hundred years the division of the isle of Britain was a constant cause of weakness and public distress. Nothing did more to bring the two peoples together than religion, after the Reformation, yet, by an unhappy turn of affairs, and mainly thanks to one man, John Knox, few causes were more potent than religious differences in delaying that complete union which nature herself seemed to desire.
The historical causes which kept the nations separate were mainly racial, though, from a very early period, the majority of Early conditions. the people of Scotland were, if not purely English by blood, anglicized in language and, to a great extent, in institutions. All questions of race are dim, for such a thing as a European people of pure unmixed blood is probably unknown in experience. In A.D. 78-82 Agricola, carrying the Eagles of Rome beyond the line of the historical border, encountered tribes and confederations of tribes which, probably, spoke, some in Gaelic, some in Brythonic varieties of the Celtic language. That the language had been imposed, in a remote age, by Celtic-speaking invaders, on a prior non-Celtic-speaking population, is probable enough, but is not demonstrated. There exist in Scotland a few inscriptions on stones, in Ogam, which yield no sense in any known Indo-European language. There are also traces of the persistence of descent in the female line, especially in the case of the Pictish royal family, but such survivals of savage institutions, or such a modification of male descent for the purpose of ensuring the purity of the royal blood, yield no firm ground for a decision as to whether the Picts were “Aryans” or “non-Aryans.”
It is unnecessary here to discuss the Pictish problem (see Celt). That their rivals, the Scots, were a Gaelic-speaking people is certain. That the Picts were Teutons (Pinkerton) is no longer believed. That they were non-Aryan, the theory of
