And now to revert to the secular story of Glasgow, which has been so long interrupted. The village had by 1136 become important enough for the site of the first Cathedral, and so through centuries it grew, retaining the reputation of being “an exceedingly beautiful little place” until the very dawn of the eighteenth century. It early stood for law and order, and preferred the Hanoverians to the Stuarts, both in the ’15 and the ’45: opposing the Old Pretender on the first occasion with 600 men, and Prince Charlie on the second with double that number. But the city was made to supply the rebels of 1745 with £5,000 in gold and £500 worth of munitions. Its population was then about 50,000. In 1768, when the modern commercial career of Glasgow may be said to have commenced, in the works for the deepening of the Clyde then undertaken, the inhabitants numbered about 70,000. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the figure had risen to 83,769, in 1851 to 360,000, and is now computed at close upon one million.

The commercial genius and the farsighted energy of the Scottish people have transformed what was the shallow, muddy estuary of the Clyde into a busy waterway second to none in the world. As a river, the Clyde has never counted for much, but as an estuary it has ever been of importance; an importance, however, sadly neutralised by the shoals that from the earliest known times obstructed the passage. Even in remote days Glasgow made attempts to clear the fairway, and in 1565 efforts were devoted to increasing the depth of the channel, and to correcting its course, “aimless in its wanderings, and dangerous with banks and quicksands.” But little was done, and in 1651 it was reported as every day more and more filling up. At that time no considerable vessel could approach nearer Glasgow than Dumbarton, fourteen miles distant, and the tonnage of the port was a mere 957 tons. This condition of affairs remained until 1740, when John Golborne, a Chester engineer, was employed to dredge and build jetties.

But in 1755, high-water at the Broomielaw still gave a depth of only five feet, and at low-water there were but eighteen inches. To-day, on the same spot, there is a twenty-five feet depth of water, and the largest ocean-going steamers lie off the crowded quays.

But there is no finality here. If there were, Glasgow would be thinking of shutting up shop. Dredging is still in progress, and the bottomless Loch Long still receives the resultant harvest of mud. Meanwhile, the revenue of the River Clyde Trust goes soaring up. One hundred and fifty years ago it was £1,500 per annum. In 1898 it was £430,000, and doubtless by now considerably exceeds half a million sterling. The Broomielaw, once, in a distant past, a wild waterside common where broom and heather flourished, is now a combination of Thames Street and Blackfriars, London, the resemblance heightened by the similarity of Glasgow Bridge and the lattice-girder railway-bridges to those spanning the Thames.

The beauty of these lower reaches of the Clyde has, therefore, departed; but although the river at Glasgow may look and smell very like a sewer, Glaswegians are proud of it, as they have every right to be, for it is their very own. The story is told of such a proprietary Glasgow man being assured by a Canadian that a dozen Clydes could be added to the St. Lawrence, and no difference be observed. “Weel, mebbe,” the Glaswegian is reported to have said; “the St. Lawrence is th’ wark o’ th’ Almichty, but we made th’ Clyde oorsels.”

The Clyde shipbuilding yards are to-day the first in the world, and the riverside, from Glasgow city to Port Glasgow and Greenock, rings with the clang of the hammers and the noise of the riveters busily adding to the maritime tonnage of the nation.

North of the Cathedral is the more than usually unlovely district of Port Dundas, where, beside the two canals that give the neighbourhood the rather magnificent name of “Port,” are all manner of warehouses and manufactories. This also is the St. Rollox district. I do not know who St. Rollox was, but his name suggest as canonised boating champion. The place is notable for the tall chimney of Townsend’s chemical works: “St. Rollox’s big stalk,” 489 feet in height, said to be the tallest chimney in the world. In a furious gale it sways like a flagstaff. After an existence of fifty years, the lofty chimney was being repointed in August 1907 when John Goldie, a steeplejack, fell from the summit and was of course killed, every bone in his body being broken.

The south, as well as the north, has its industrial sights. Across the river in Hutchesontown, is the well-known “Dixon’s Blazes”: great ironworks that shed an infernal glow by night over the street and the tramcars that run by. No Glaswegian ever willingly allows the stranger to depart without seeing “Dixon’s Blazes”: but, after all, Middlesbrough can show bigger sights in that kind.

After all, the most instructive views are Glasgow on a Saturday night and the same place (but so changed that you ask yourself, Can it be the same?) on Sunday. At midnight on Saturday, Glasgow is roaring drunk and the neighbourhoods of the Trongate and the Central Station are veritable pandemoniums: but on Sunday those not thoughtful enough to have laid in a private store of alcoholic liquor must needs go thirsty, for Scotland is the land of rigorous Sunday closing. The only way to circumvent this barbarous observance is to arm one’s self with a prescription from a complaisant medical practitioner, indicating the following:

Presented at any chemist’s, this results, strange to say, in a preparation not to be distinguished from what is sold on week-days across the public bars as “whiskey and soda.”

It is along the Great Western Road, and in the park at Kelvingrove, that Sunday finds Glasgow at its best: for there you are in the residential districts, and the finest feathers are then assumed for church-parade. It is the picturesque made more picturesque by the stately group of the University buildings, erected between 1866 and 1870.

Glasgow having the reputation of being the “best-governed city in Great Britain,” it behoves the stranger, if not to pry into its great tramways, gas and water and electric-lighting undertakings, and the like municipal activities, at least to see the civic centre of the place. This is George Square. A citizen of Glasgow—I think he was a Lord Provost, or at the very least of it a bailie—has written a history of George Square, from whose pages you may learn how (like Britain arising at Heaven’s command from the azure main) George Square came into being from some pitiful malebolge, at the august will of the city council. It is a story touched to great issues, and if it does not make my heart beat to a quicker rate, that is my own insufficiency.

To a Londoner, who cannot help his vice of comparison, George Square is another, and a smaller, Trafalgar Square. To aid the resemblance and confirm the smallness of the scale, here is a column in the centre. Sir Walter Scott, and not Nelson, it is who in effigy occupies the summit. The thing looks as though, with a little judicious watering and careful culture, it might some day grow to be a Nelson column. All around are other statues: equestrian effigies of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; and Colin Campbell, Thomas Campbell, Peel, Livingstone, Sir John Moore, Burns, and others on foot. One side of the Square is occupied by the “City Chambers”: what in England we would term the Town Hall. This is a great pile designed by William Young, architect of the new War Office building in London; and in the same classic renaissance style, with the same old pepper-castor pavilions at either end: the usual small ones (for cayenne) in the middle, and the inevitable pediment and indispensable tower. The cost was £540,000, the building was open in 1888, and this, the third or fourth Glasgow Town Hall, each one in succession larger than its forebear, is already too small. So also is the inconvenient General Post Office building, near by, opened in 1876.

In connection with the bronze Valhalla of heroes in George Square, it may be noted that Glasgow is, in general, great in statues and memorials. Probably the most majestic statue of Wellington in existence is that in front of the Exchange, an equestrian effigy by Marochetti. Nelson, on the other hand, is commemorated by a tall obelisk on Glasgow Green.