SCOTLAND has changed and changed utterly.

That was the refrain running through my final speech as First Minister to an SNP conference on Friday. The words are borrowed from WB Yeats on the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin. But while Ireland's path to sovereignty a century ago was a difficult one, the revolution which Scotland's referendum campaign unleashed was and continues to be a profoundly peaceful and democratic one.

The Yes campaign did not prevail on September 18, 2014, but that date will now come to be seen as the pivotal moment in Scotland's story: the tipping point at which the final destination become all but inevitable.

Because, as I made clear to SNP ­delegates in Perth, the experience of the referendum campaign has left me more convinced than ever that Scotland will indeed become an independent nation.

I have now passed on the baton of SNP leadership to Nicola Sturgeon, and in a few short days the role of First Minister will also be hers. Nicola will be an absolutely outstanding leader for both party and country, and in those roles will, I believe, make history.

Being First Minister of Scotland has been the biggest privilege of my life.

The last seven years have been an extraordinary time for me personally, for the party and for the country as a whole.

And Scotland, I believe, is a much, much more confident and forward-looking nation than it was when I took office in 2007.

That is not a consequence of one person or one party's leadership - rather it is the natural result of a process which has been ongoing since our national Parliament was restored in 1999.

During my time as First Minister, I have faced a range of opponents across the floor of the debating chamber at Holyrood. Opposition leaders have come and gone - none more so than on the Labour benches.

And while some commentators have gone out of their way to pillory the succession of Labour opponents who have shadowed me, calling into question their capabilities and political acumen, I believe the problem for Labour is far more profound than that.

Because in Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray and Johann Lamont, Labour have had people of significant stature and commitment.

Rather, their problem has been one of institutional weakness - a flaw which has seen Scottish Labour reduced, in Johann Lamont's own strikingly candid words, to a "branch office".

She also railed against the Westminster "dinosaurs" preventing the party in Scotland from running itself.

The net result of this in political and electoral terms has been that Labour have ceded the field to the SNP as the natural party of government in and for Scotland, because a branch office by definition cannot compete with a fully-fledged national party.

Labour's problem is also that it found itself on the wrong side of the national question by its hand-in-glove alliance with the Tories in Better Together.

Because while a majority of Scots did not vote for independence, many, many people will no longer trust the Labour Party to stand up for their own or Scotland's best interests.

And that is likely to be demonstrated in the starkest way possible next May when Labour faces a day of reckoning at the ballot box in Scotland.

The SNP is ready to mount our biggest, best-organised and best resourced Westminster campaign ever, with many of the 85,000-plus members mobilising to ensure we press home the advantage that gives us on the ground in constituencies across the land.

The wind is in our sails and we have set a target of winning a UK election in Scotland for the first time in the SNP's history, with the prospect of candidates being selected from among the wide Yes alliance which so invigorated Scottish politics these last few months.

The question of any future independence referendum is one for my successor and, ultimately, for the people to determine.

In the meantime, the constitutional imperative is for the Westminster parties to deliver on their "vow" of home rule and maximum devolution.

Anything that falls short of that promise of serious and substantial new powers for Scotland will only ensure that the Westminster establishment pays a heavy price at the hands of the Scottish electorate.

The last seven years have been ones of substantial achievement for Scotland.

One of the achievements I am proudest of is the action we took to restore the right to a Scottish university education based on the ability to learn rather than the ability to pay.

We did this by abolishing tuition fees - at a time when fees have soared to £9000 a year in other parts of the UK, putting university out of reach for many without the means to pay.

To borrow from Yeats once more, education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

When I returned as SNP leader a decade ago, our membership was around 8000, and all our members could have been fitted into St Johnstone's McDiarmid Park stadium along the road from the Perth Concert Hall venue where we held this weekend's conference.

Today, not even Hampden or Murrayfield could accommodate our members.

A party invigorated, a people energised and a nation transformed - Scotland has changed and changed utterly.