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intractable of challenges of our own time, such as how to exploit the benefits of capitalism without destroying society’s ethical framework, and how to balance the aspirations of the individual against the needs of the collectivity. Hutcheson decreed thatsociety’s ultimate purpose was “the greatest good of the greatest number.” In The Wealth of Nations, Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the “benevolence” of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists. *14 Hume decreed that “Liberty is the perfection of society,” but believed equally that “authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom’s] very existence.” Two observations by Ferguson could have been minted as mantras for Macdonald: “Man is born in society and there he remains” and, even more so, “No government is copied from a plan: the secrets of government are locked up in human nature.”
    These Scots were all progressive conservatives. They believed in natural democracy and in meritocracy, and because they were intensely practical men they believed in education. A 1694 law decreed that each parish in Scotland had to have its own school; England wouldn’t catch up until the end of the nineteenth century. Scots’ churches (except for the Catholic ones) elected their own pastors. Yet the people were skeptical about the fashionable new doctrine of political democracy—and they were outright hostile to revolution. More than a fifth of the Loyalists, for example, were Scots, among them Flora Macdonald, the Scottish heroine who hid Prince Charles from the English soldiers after his defeat at Culloden, and who eventually made her way back to the Isle of Skye by way of Nova Scotia. A cause for this skepticism was theirdisbelief in the perfectibility of human nature. Ferguson warned, “The individual considers his community only so far as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement and profit.” Common sense was their golden rule, not least in the Philosophy of Common Sense, which would play such a part in the development of higher education in Canada.
    These enlightened Scots most certainly believed in progress, including technological progress. James Watt developed the steam engine, for example, and John McAdam, hard-surfaced roads. They also believed in the ability of a society to improve itself; otherwise, all that education and that unleashing of enlightened self-interest would be in vain. Yet they were very conservative. As Lord Kames put it, “Without property, labour and industry were in vain.”
    The Scottish Enlightenment had run its course before Macdonald was born, and as a young child he moved thousands of miles away from Scotland. Yet in Kingston most of his teachers were Scots. His mother’s love of reading, which he inherited and which was so rare among his peers in those early years in Canada, came directly from the respect for knowledge that the Enlightenment implanted in all Scots. All kinds of echoes of the ideas initiated in Edinburgh can be found in Macdonald’s own thinking—his disbelief in the possibility of human progress, his belief in the possibility of causing a society to progress (why else throw a railway across a wilderness?), his indifference to political democracy and yet his inherently democratic nature, as you’d expect for someone coming from a society whose national poet laureate had proclaimed “A man’s a man for a’ that.” No less so, Macdonald would have accepted Robbie Burns’s skepticism, so quintessentially Scottish: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promised joy.” Macdonald wasn’t aproduct of the Scottish Enlightenment,