HE Scottish contribution to American development may seem, at first, a -well-worn theme1 and one on which there has been an unusual amount of agreement on both sides of the Atlantic. American and Scottish writers have vied with each other in echoing Woodrow Wilson's dictum that every line of strength in American history "is a line colored with Scottish blood." So much attention, indeed, has been paid by such writers to these lines that they seem almost to assume the warp and woof of an American national pattern looking very much like the tartan itself. And "the broadsword virtues of the clan" become, in their hands, the origin and inspiration of the American experience at its most distinctive and best: constitutional government, national and local democracy, business ability, technological genius, the independent and common-sense spirit in all fields, religious and secular-in short, "rugged individualism" in church, state, and countinghouse. Yet the phrase itself, "the broadsword virtues of the clan," taken from Stephen Vincent Benet's characterization of the Old South, suggests that it is possible to look on Scottish influence on America from a less uncritical and one-sided viewpoint. One might come down from the hilltops of national achievement into the valley of the shadow of Reconstruction to see another and less liberal Scottish influence at work at the very birth of a nation. The title of Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s infamous work, which, in the form of D. W. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation, has not helped to