DECLINE AND FALL OF EDINBURGH.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2002, 11 February 1907, Page 3

DECLINE AND FALL OF EDINBURGH.

I In tho decline and fall of Edinburgh as a placo of any importance, oitlior intellectually or commercially, every Scotsman (says tho Glasgow News) with a shred of natural sentiment will seo a phenomenon disgraceful, not to Edinburgh, but to Scotland at largo. Tho relative importance of tho old capital and of Glasgow in the present day is significant of tlio altered position in our country in tlio last hundred years. Glasgow grows mightily, and groans in travail, a Cinderella among cities, supplying tho material wants of tho world, which—onco you got 20 miles beyond her border —neither admires nor esteems her half so much as her humble industry (to say no more) deserves. Edinburgh, which onco sheltered all that was brilliant, gallant, poetic, artistic, and intellectual in Scotland, finds herself denuded of either brains or enterprise has failed to produce and retain a man of more than parochial reputation for three or four generations, and is regarded by all except her extraordinary civic misrulers merely as an interesting museum of_ old national relics. It is pathetic to see tho pother Edinburgh and Lord Rosebery make about such comparatively insignificant affairs as the removal of the Scots Greys and the threatened demolition of the Ayr Brig. These patriotic convulsions aro several ages too lato, and Edinburgh, that ought to be throbbing with national life, that ought to be the Mecca and the pride of ovory Scot who loves his own land, and would wish for her more than workshop or shopkeeping glory, attracts nobody but the tourist, who, walking under lior ancient citadel, may indulge his melancholy in thinking of the past, not only where tho trumpet sounded and tho banner flew, but where philosophy and wit and poetry flourished in the streets of the modern Athens, in which they are found no more. What Edinburgh might have been! What she might have been if Scotland had maintained her Parliamentary independence for the few years more that were necessary to get her over the shoals of tho Darien Folly and on to the crest of the wave of industrial expansion that was inevitable if her statesmen could only have read the signs aright! To-day Edinburgh would have been a gem of tho Empire no less brilliant because she was first and foremost the heart and pride of Scotland. London would not then be dragging our wealth from us, sucking our brains, and paying us back with indifference or contempt. But the thing is done ; the “auld sang” is ended, and we are left to the contemplation of Edinburgh’s last kick as a placo of power, as it is revealed in such books as Mr Fyfe’s “Edinburgh Under Sir Walter Scott.”