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By 1914 some 65 per cent of Scotland's people lived in the central belt of the country between the Firth of Forth and Clyde, and a steady drift from the countryside into towns and cities continued, until, by the 1930s, 80 per cent of Scots were concentrated in this area. The major employers were the 'heavy' industries - coal mining, iron and steel-founding, shipbuilding and engineering. More than 200,000 families derived their livelihood from these industries, and a further 150,000 were sustained by employment in textile production. Thus more than half the population was dependent upon labour-intensive manufacturing industry.

In the late 1800s and into the twentieth century, these industries were earning large profits, and great wealth came to the owners, who enjoyed, in late Victorian and Edwardian times, life-styles enviable for leisure and luxury. Unfortunately, though individual acts of charity were frequent, there was no official social conscience; and, in the presence of great riches, industrial workers lived lives governed by low wages, long hours and frequently unhealthy and dangerous working conditions. Away from the workplace, living conditions were, as came to be realised, a national disgrace. Housing, whether provided by employers or by builders planning to draw rents, was generally cheap in construction, poor in quality and grudging in space. If employers had provided high-quality housing, then their profits would have suffered. If builders had offered high quality rented homes, a low-paid workforce could never have paid the rents required.

So, buildings were crammed into confined sites, often cheek-by-jowl with colliery and yard, factory and foundry; rooms were small, and around 53 per cent of families, no matter how numerous, lived in houses with one or two rooms. Indoor sanitation was absent or shared, and the effect of these conditions upon the health and life-expectancy of the people was bound to be damaging. Typhoid fever and even cholera survived into the twentieth century; epidemics of diphtheria and scarlet fever were virtually annual, and tuberculosis killed thousands. Poverty led to malnutrition, and diseases caused by diet deficiency, like rickets, were common. To make matters worse, the houses were themselves aging, and new building was quite inadequate to provide homes for the rising population between 1850 and 1900.

To make matters worse, though few could have realised it, Scotland's days of industrial success were already numbered. The appearance of economic success endured and examples of technological excellence (such as the building of the first turbine-powered steamer, King Edward in 1901) occurred, but the basis of Scotland's role as one of the world's workshops was weakening.

The resources of iron and coal upon which industrial growth had been founded, had been, or were becoming, exhausted. Many countries were able to exploit resources far beyond those available in Scotland, and were also better placed geographically to manufacture and trade. These emerging competitors commonly employed modern technology, having learned from and improved upon Scottish - and English - exemplars. Scotland's industrial experience proved the truth of Andrew Carnegie's remark that 'pioneering don't pay'. To a great extent, therefore, decline arose from realities of mineralogy, geology and geography, for which no one can be blamed. Criticism can, however, be made of the owners and managers who persevered with old-fashioned equipment and methods, preferring unbroken production in the present to the prospect of greater productivity in the future.