[Speech of John Foord at the 143d annual banquet of the St. Andrew's
Society of the State of New York, December 1, 1899. The speech was
delivered in response to the toast, "The Land O' Cakes."]
MR. PRESIDENT, MEMBERS AND GUESTS OF THE ST. ANDREW'S
SOCIETY:--I suppose there are some in this company who would find
it hard to tell the difference between a bear bannock and a pease scone.
For the benefit of such, I may be permitted to say that there was no
suggestion of fancy bread about the "cakes" with which the name of
Scotland has been associated. They were very plain bread, indeed, and
quite as destitute of leaven as that which the Children of Israel were
condemned to eat in the wilderness. The only sweetening they had came
from the fact that they were the fruit of honest toil; and hunger, as
you know, is "gude kitchen." Together with the "hale-some parritch,
chief o' Scotia's food," they formed the staff of life of a people whose
tastes were as simple as their ideals were high. "We cultivate
literature on a little oatmeal," was the motto proposed by Sydney Smith
for the "Edinburgh Review"; and, jocular as was the suggestion, it
touches the keynote of Scottish character and history. For, what have we
not done on a little oatmeal? Our fathers fought on it, worked on it,
thought and studied on it, wrote ballads and preached sermons on it, and
created the Scotland, kinship with which we are all so proud to claim,
on a diet chiefly composed of oat cakes and oatmeal porridge. On such
frugal fare, they subdued a harsh and stubborn soil and made it yield
its yearly toll of harvest; they took tribute of wool and mutton from
the moorland and the hillside, and of hide and beef from the fallow
lea; they levied on loch and sea to support their fisher-folk; and kept
the rock and the reel and the flying shuttle busy to clothe themselves
with homespun, so that the old Arbroath toast became a very epitome of
the vocations of that primitive time: "The life o' man, the death o'
fish, the shuttle, and the plough; corn, horn, linen, yarn, lint, and
tarry 'oo." Nay more, defying the rigors of an ungenial climate, they
set themselves, in their dour and stubborn way, to make flowers grow
where Nature never intended such flowers to be; and they became so
cunning in the mystery of Adam's art that the Scottish gardener took the
place of direction wherever men laid out flower-beds or built
greenhouses throughout the civilized world.
On such simple lines of industry were laid the foundations of the
material greatness of Scotland--its mines, its furnaces, its machine
shops, its shipyards, its flax and jute mills, and all the other forms
of productive energy that have placed this little country and its few
millions of people in the front rank of the mechanical activity of the
world. But is it because of such triumphs as these that the name of
Scotland appeals so powerfully to the heart and the imagination of men?
I think not. Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the
bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure
hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the
passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the
flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our
Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the
country is what it has been made by them. I heard Governor Roosevelt say
the other evening that the State of New York was merely another name for
the aggregate of the people in it, and I could not help thinking that
there must be in the Dutch blood a certain deficiency of imagination.
Can you imagine a Scotsman, however matter-of-fact and commonplace,
offering such a definition of his native land? The land of brown heath
and shaggy wood, land of the mountain and the flood, the land of our
sires, must be, indeed, part of ourselves; but it is also something
beyond and above ourselves,--the cradle of memories that will fade only
with our latest breath, the home of traditions, whose spell we could
not, if we would, shake off, the seat of beauty and of grandeur that we
somehow think are finer than the fairest or sublimest scenes that earth
can show. We know the feeling that prompted Byron to say:--
"When I see some tall rock lift its head to the sky,
Then I think of the hills that o'ershadow Culbean."
For, to most of us, in all our intercourse with Nature, the Scottish
mind supplies a Scottish background. There is nothing that affects me
quite so powerfully as a fine sunset; but I confess that, from all the
magnificent sunsets that I have seen between the Palisades and the Rocky
Mountains, I have derived no such emotion as I have felt when,
"gathering his glory for a grand repose," the sun set behind the
Grampians; and the peak of Schehallion, like a spearhead, cleft the
evening sky. Why, the Scottish exile thinks that the sun turns a
kindlier face to his native land than it does to countries less favored,
like the one who sang:--
"The sun rises bright in France,
And fair sets he;
But he's tint the blythe blink he had
In my ain countrie."
We are what we are, gentlemen, because the land of our birth is "Bonnie
Scotland," as well as the "Land o' Cakes." Its beauty has entered into
our blood; its majesty and sublimity have given us a certain elevation
of soul. Thus it came about that, beside the homely kailyard virtues of
our forefathers, and their stern uncompromising religious zeal, there
grew up in all their wild beauty such a profusion of the flowers of
song, of poetry, and of romance that you shall hardly find between
Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on
Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been
celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came
that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of
Scotland was vocal--melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning
wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers
played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the
hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for
the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels had lived
and died generations before Burns and Ferguson, Tannahill and Lady
Nairne, and all the rest of our sweet singers took the old tunes and
gave them a form and vesture as immortal as their own fame. We are
called a practical, hard-headed people, and so we are; but the most
enduring part of our literature tells of the romantic ideals that
Scotsmen have cherished and the chivalrous deeds they have done. We are
thought to be severely logical; and if allowance be made for our point
of view, we are that also. But the unsympathetic student of Scottish
history will not get very far with his subject by keeping steadily in
mind our practicalness and our logic. If he thinks of these alone, he
will be apt to pronounce those Scotsmen fools who sacrificed two
centuries of progress for the barren, if glorious, privilege of national
independence; he will think they must have been pure fanatics who spilt
their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in
their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who
sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the
House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the
warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it
is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of
common sense, as applied to human conduct, that has given the Scottish
race their unique position among the tribes of men.
And, even in this age of steam and electricity, they will still cherish
their romance. It was but the other day that there was pointed out to
the Gordon Highlanders in the Transvaal the expediency of exchanging the
garb of old Gaul for a uniform of khaki: the one would be less of a
shining mark for the enemy than the other, and, its adoption would
probably result in saving many lives. You know their decision. I think I
hear them say, "All this may well be true; but we stand by the kilt and
the tartan." That, a critical world may say, is magnificent, but it is
not war. We say, magnificent or not, it is war; for the kilt and the
tartan are inseparable from the sentiment that makes these men the
redoubtable soldiers they are. Take those away, and you break their
touch with a continuous tradition which transforms every man in the
regiment, be he Scottish, English or Irish, into a Gordon, with all the
dash and vim and dare-devil courage that centre around the name. The
Gordon blood in him helped Byron to understand and express the potency
of the Highland tradition:--
"But, with the breath that fills
Their mountain pipe, so fill the mountaineers
With the fierce native daring which instills
The stirring memories of a thousand years.
And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears."
May there never come a time when the mind of our race will be closed
against such a sentiment as that! Let us go on doing our share,
resolutely, faithfully, conscientiously, of the work of the world; let
us keep well to the front with the same success that we have done of
yore; but let us not forget that we owe the unconquerable spirit in us
to our Auld Mither Scotland, that it is from her breast there has been
drawn the celestial ichor which has nourished genius in the cottage as
generously as in the Hall, and that has made the inheritance of the
ploughman's son more precious than a Dukedom. We shall, as your
President has said, be better, and not worse citizens of this great
Republic; we shall play our part all the more worthily, in public or
private station, if every fibre of our being thrills to an auld Scotch
sang, and we feel in our inmost heart that--
"Where the caller breezes sweep
Across the mountain's breast,
Where the free in soul are nurst,
Is the land that we lo'e best."