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In Scotland's industrial heyday her industries were planned and operated by men who were technically expert, or, at least, well-informed. Men like Lord Kelvin could spend mornings researching and lecturing on the theories of physics and engineering, and the afternoons in the engineering shop, applying these theories to the practical task of producton. But as time passed, owners became remote, mere investors or administrators, detached from technological experience or experiment. The managers to whom they left the day-to-day running of industry, all too often showed the practical man's contempt for theory - 'mere' theory as the revealing phrase puts it. The close integration of theory and practice characteristic of the rise of Scottish industry - the tradition of James Watt and Lord Kelvin, and of Robert and David Napier, the virtual creators of the Clyde's greatness as a centre of shipbuilding and marine engineering - gradually disappeared.

This industrial decline was not, of course, clearly apparent at the time. Only in later years when statistics became available did it emerge that Scottish heavy industries reached, in 1913, a peak of production never to be achieved again. The decline was halted, temporarily, by the boost to productivity given by the Great War, but by the 1920s Scotland was distinguished by persistently high rates of unemployment and similarly high rates of emigration. The population was static and aging, and, in the post war world, the Scottish economy was clearly sick and failing.

Inevitably these developments had political consequences. Scotland was usually overwhelmingly loyal at election times to the Liberal party. That party was supported by employers and workers alike in industrial areas, while in the rural constituencies and in the Highlands, the influence of the Free Church, often victimised by Tory landowners, was exerted in the Liberal interest.

Towards the end of the century however, things began to change. The Liberal commitment to Home Rule for Ireland led to a split in the party, and to the formation of the Liberal-Unionists. This group - still Liberal in terms of economic theory - drew support from Protestant industrialists, businessmen and others of the middle-class, unwilling to support any diminution of British sovereignty and hostile to the placing of Ireland's Protestant minority under an all-Irish and, therefore, overwhelmingly Catholic parliament in Dublin. As a result, the number of Liberal seats in Scotland fell from 57 in 1885 to 39 in 1886. The Conservatives, who won only 10 in 1885, won 12 in 1886, and enjoyed the support of 16 Liberal Unionists.

As more working men joined the electorate, and as new issues like high tariffs and the threat of more expensive food arose, Liberal strength momentarily revived, and in the elections between 1906 and 1910 the Liberals enjoyed something like their old dominance. Events during and immediately after the war, however, disrupted the Liberals who suffered a fatally damaging split into rival factons.

The basic idea, that working people ought to have, and to support, a party which was specifically theirs, preoccupied with issues relevant to them, was as old as the Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s. The idea revived in the 1880s in Scotland, with the formation of the Scottish Labour Party. This venture did not long survive the departure of its moving spirit, James Keir Hardie, to England, where, in 1893 Hardie and others formed the Independent Labour Party.