which gives a good education to dissenters, or that a dissenter gets
nothing by a system which gives a good education to churchmen. We are
not, I hope, so much conformists, or so much nonconformists, as to
forget that we are Englishmen and Christians. We all, Churchmen,
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, have an interest in
this, that the great body of the people should be rescued from ignorance
and barbarism. I mentioned Lord George Gordon's mob. That mob began,
it is true, with the Roman Catholics: but, long before the tumults were
over, there was not a respectable Protestant in London who was not in
fear for his house, for his limbs, for his life, for the lives of those
who were dearest to him. The honourable Member for Finsbury says that we
call on men to pay for an education from which they derive no benefit.
I deny that there is one honest and industrious man in the country who
derives no benefit from living among honest and industrious neighbours
rather than among rioters and vagabonds. This matter is as much a matter
of common concern as the defence of our coast. Suppose that I were
to say, "Why do you tax me to fortify Portsmouth? If the people of
Portsmouth think that they cannot be safe without bastions and ravelins,
let the people of Portsmouth pay the engineers and masons. Why am I to
bear the charge of works from which I derive no advantage?" You would
answer, and most justly, that there is no man in the island who does
not derive advantage from these works, whether he resides within them or
not. And, as every man, in whatever part of the island he may live, is
bound to contribute to the support of those arsenals which are necessary
for our common security, so is every man, to whatever sect he may
belong, bound to contribute to the support of those schools on which,
not less than on our arsenals, our common security depends.
I now come to the last words of the amendment. The honourable Member
for Finsbury is apprehensive that our plan may interfere with the
civil rights of Her Majesty's subjects. How a man's civil rights can be
prejudiced by his learning to read and write, to multiply and divide, or
even by his obtaining some knowledge of history and geography, I do
not very well apprehend. One thing is clear, that persons sunk in that
ignorance in which, as we are assured by the Congregational Union, great
numbers of our countrymen are sunk, can be free only in name. It is
hardly necessary for us to appoint a Select Committee for the purpose of
inquiring whether knowledge be the ally or the enemy of liberty. He is,
I must say, but a short-sighted friend of the common people who is eager
to bestow on them a franchise which would make them all-powerful, and
yet would withhold from them that instruction without which their power
must be a curse to themselves and to the State.
This, Sir, is my defence. From the clamour of our accusers I appeal with
confidence to the country to which we must, in no long time, render
an account of our stewardship. I appeal with still more confidence
to future generations, which, while enjoying all the blessings of an
impartial and efficient system of public instruction, will find it
difficult to believe that the authors of that system should have had
to struggle with a vehement and pertinacious opposition, and still more
difficult to believe that such an opposition was offered in the name of
civil and religious freedom.
*****
INAUGURAL SPEECH AT GLASGOW COLLEGE. (MARCH 21, 1849) A SPEECH DELIVERED
AT THE COLLEGE OF GLASGOW ON THE 21ST OF MARCH, 1849.
At the election of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, in
November, 1848, the votes stood thus: Mr Macaulay, 255; Colonel Mure,
203. The installation took place on the twenty-first of March, 1849;
and after that ceremony had been performed, the following Speech was
delivered.
My first duty, Gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the honour
which you have conferred on me. You well know that it was wholly
unsolicited; and I can assure you that it was wholly unexpected. I
may add that, if I had been invited to become a candidate for your
suffrages, I should respectfully have declined the invitation. My
predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend,
declared from this place last year in language which well became him,
that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman
as Lord John Russell. I can with equal truth affirm that I would
not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so
accomplished a scholar as Colonel Mure. But Colonel Mure felt last
year that it was not for him, and I now feel that it is not for me,
to question the propriety of your decision on a point of which, by the
constitution of your body, you are the judges. I therefore gratefully
accept the office to which I have been called, fully purposing to use
whatever powers belong to it with a single view to the welfare and
credit of your society.
I am not using a mere phrase of course, when I say that the feelings
with which I bear apart in the ceremony of this day are such as I find
it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange that, when
that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand,
he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which
rushed into his mind was such as even he could not easily arrange or
express. In truth there are few spectacles more striking or affecting
than that which a great historical place of education presents on a
solemn public day. There is something strangely interesting in the
contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and
ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and
hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once
brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the
foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the
time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the
guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may,
with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has
chanced that my magistracy has fallen on a great secular epoch. This
is the four hundredth year of the existence of your University. At such
jubilees, jubilees of which no individual sees more than one, it is
natural, and it is good, that a society like this, a society which
survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed, a society
which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should
review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth from infancy
to maturity, and should try to find, in the experience of generations
which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations
yet unborn.
The retrospect is full of interest and instruction. Perhaps it may be
doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of
time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at
which the existence of your University commenced. It was at the moment
of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was
instituted just before the empire of the East perished; that strange
empire which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of
darkness, connected together the two great ages of light; that empire
which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one
man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst
of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius, which the highest
minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring
despair. And at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were
plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in
pieces Grecian sculptures, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian
eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were
calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious
Sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The
University came into existence just in time to witness the disappearance
of the last trace of the Roman empire, and to witness the publication of
the earliest printed book.
At this conjuncture, a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history
of letters, a man, never to be mentioned without reverence by every
lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment
to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much must not
prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion, and in this
place, justice and gratitude demand, to the founder of the University
of Glasgow, the greatest of the restorers of learning, Pope Nicholas the
Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his
erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied
much and travelled far. He had visited Britain, which, in wealth and
refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of
America now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes of
Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally
of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the
protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arranged the first
public library that Modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder
rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which
had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious
group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly
of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George
of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio
Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after
the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the
world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual
treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine
empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the
farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or
copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of
immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions
of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no
department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were
introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great and unrivalled
models of historical composition, the work of Herodotus and the work of
Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with
the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon and with the manly good
sense of Polybius.
It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention
was called to the intellectual wants of this region, a region now
swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the
clang of machinery, a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its
admirable fabrics to the lands of which, in his days, no geographer had
ever heard, then a wild, a poor, a half barbarous tract, lying on the
utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of
establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of
learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna.
I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named
Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot
in the world had been more favoured by nature or by art. The surrounding
country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of cornfields and
vineyards. In the city, the house of Bentivoglo bore rule, a house which
vied with the house of Medici in taste and magnificence, which has
left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid
patronage to arts and letters. Glasgow your founder just knew to be a
poor, a small, a rude town, a town, as he would have thought, not likely
ever to be great and opulent; for the soil, compared with the rich
country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was
such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on
the fertility of the soil, it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere,
that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition
can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna
into a desert. Nor is it beyond the power of human intelligence and
energy, developed by civil and spiritual freedom, to turn sterile rocks
and pestilential marshes into cities and gardens. Enlightened as your
founder was, he little knew that he was himself a chief agent in a great
revolution, physical and moral, political and religious, in a revolution
destined to make the last first and the first last, in a revolution
destined to invert the relative positions of Glasgow and Bologna. We
cannot, I think, better employ a few minutes than in reviewing the
stages of this great change in human affairs.
The review shall be short. Indeed I cannot do better than pass rapidly
from century to century. Look at the world, then, a hundred years after
the seal of Nicholas had been affixed to the instrument which
called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland
especially, in the agonies of that great revolution which we
emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which
Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which
the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable
instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated.
Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended; and that
talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in Knowledge as a
handmaid to decorate Superstition, and their error produced its natural
effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical
learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists,
as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual
tyranny. They formed, in fact, the vanguard of that movement. Every
one of the chief Reformers--I do not at this moment remember a single
exception--was a Humanist. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of
Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a
Reformer. In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of
Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds
daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily
grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic
divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the
whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within
the reach even of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the
Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and
nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst
of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power
and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University
closed.
Pass another hundred years; and we are in the midst of another
revolution. The war between Popery and Protestantism had, in this
island, been terminated by the victory of Protestantism. But from that
war another war had sprung, the war between Prelacy and Puritanism.
The hostile religious sects were allied, intermingled, confounded with
hostile political parties. The monarchical element of the constitution
was an object of almost exclusive devotion to the Prelatist. The popular
element of the constitution was especially dear to the Puritan. At
length an appeal was made to the sword. Puritanism triumphed; but
Puritanism was already divided against itself. Independency and
Republicanism were on one side, Presbyterianism and limited Monarchy on
the other. It was in the very darkest part of that dark time, it was
in the midst of battles, sieges, and executions, it was when the whole
world was still aghast at the awful spectacle of a British King standing
before a judgment seat, and laying his neck on a block, it was when the
mangled remains of the Duke of Hamilton had just been laid in the tomb
of his house, it was when the head of the Marquess of Montrose had just
been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that your University completed
her second century.
A hundred years more; and we have at length reached the beginning of a
happier period. Our civil and religious liberties had indeed been bought
with a fearful price. But they had been bought. The price had been
paid. The last battle had been fought on British ground. The last black
scaffold had been set up on Tower Hill. The evil days were over. A
bright and tranquil century, a century of religious toleration, of
domestic peace, of temperate freedom, of equal justice, was beginning.
That century is now closing. When we compare it with any equally long
period in the history of any other great society, we shall find abundant
cause for thankfulness to the Giver of all good. Nor is there any place
in the whole kingdom better fitted to excite this feeling than the place
where we are now assembled. For in the whole kingdom we shall find no
district in which the progress of trade, of manufactures, of wealth,
and of the arts of life, has been more rapid than in Clydesdale. Your
University has partaken largely of the prosperity of this city and of
the surrounding region. The security, the tranquillity, the liberty,
which have been propitious to the industry of the merchant and of the
manufacturer, have been also propitious to the industry of the scholar.
To the last century belong most of the names of which you justly boast.
The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all
the illustrious men who, during that period, taught or learned wisdom
within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists,
philologists, metaphysicians, poets: Simpson and Hunter, Millar and
Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a
grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer,
of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the
history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters
of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single
man has done, since the New Atlantis of Bacon was written, to accomplish
that glorious prophecy. We now speak the language of humility when we
say that the University of Glasgow need not fear a comparison with the
University of Bologna.
A fifth secular period is about to commence. There is no lack of
alarmists who will tell you that it is about to commence under evil
auspices. But from me you must expect no such gloomy prognostications.
I have heard them too long and too constantly to be scared by them. Ever
since I began to make observations on the state of my country, I have
been seeing nothing but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay. The
more I contemplate our noble institutions, the more convinced I am that
they are sound at heart, that they have nothing of age but its dignity,
and that their strength is still the strength of youth. The hurricane,
which has recently overthrown so much that was great and that seemed
durable, has only proved their solidity. They still stand, august and
immovable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruin all
around us. I see no reason to doubt that, by the blessing of God on
a wise and temperate policy, on a policy of which the principle is
to preserve what is good by reforming in time what is evil, our civil
institutions may be preserved unimpaired to a late posterity, and that,
under the shade of our civil institutions, our academical institutions
may long continue to flourish.
I trust, therefore, that, when a hundred years more have run out, this
ancient College will still continue to deserve well of our country and
of mankind. I trust that the installation of 1949 will be attended by a
still greater assembly of students than I have the happiness now to see
before me. That assemblage, indeed, may not meet in the place where we
have met. These venerable halls may have disappeared. My successor may
speak to your successors in a more stately edifice, in a edifice which,
even among the magnificent buildings of the future Glasgow, will still
be admired as a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in
the days of the good Queen Victoria. But, though the site and the walls
may be new, the spirit of the institution will, I hope, be still the
same. My successor will, I hope, be able to boast that the fifth century
of the University has even been more glorious than the fourth. He will
be able to vindicate that boast by citing a long list of eminent men,
great masters of experimental science, of ancient learning, of our
native eloquence, ornaments of the senate, the pulpit and the bar. He
will, I hope, mention with high honour some of my young friends who now
hear me; and he will, I also hope, be able to add that their talents
and learning were not wasted on selfish or ignoble objects, but were
employed to promote the physical and moral good of their species, to
extend the empire of man over the material world, to defend the cause
of civil and religious liberty against tyrants and bigots, and to defend
the cause of virtue and order against the enemies of all divine and
human laws.
I have now given utterance to a part, and to a part only, of the
recollections and anticipations of which, on this solemn occasion, my
mind is full. I again thank you for the honour which you have bestowed
on me; and I assure you that, while I live, I shall never cease to take
a deep interest in the welfare and fame of the body with which, by your
kindness, I have this day become connected.
*****
RE-ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT. (NOVEMBER 2, 1852) A SPEECH DELIVERED AT
EDINBURGH ON THE 2D OF NOVEMBER, 1852.
At the General Election of 1852 the votes for the City of Edinburgh
stood thus:
Mr Macaulay ...............1872
Mr Cowan ..................1754
The Lord Provost ..........1559
Mr Bruce ..................1066
Mr Campbell ............... 686
On the second of November the Electors assembled in the Music Hall to
meet the representative whom they had, without any solicitation on his
part, placed at the head of the poll. On this occasion the following
Speech was delivered.
Gentlemen,--I thank you from my heart for this kind reception. In truth,
it has almost overcome me. Your good opinion and your good will were
always very valuable to me, far more valuable than any vulgar object
of ambition, far more valuable than any office, however lucrative or
dignified. In truth, no office, however lucrative or dignified, would
have tempted me to do what I have done at your summons, to leave
again the happiest and most tranquil of all retreats for the bustle
of political life. But the honour which you have conferred upon me, an
honour of which the greatest men might well be proud, an honour which it
is in the power only of a free people to bestow, has laid on me such
an obligation that I should have thought it ingratitude, I should have
thought it pusillanimity, not to make at least an effort to serve you.
And here, Gentlemen, we meet again in kindness after a long separation.
It is more than five years since I last stood in this very place; a
large part of human life. There are few of us on whom those five years
have not set their mark, few circles from which those five years have
not taken away what can never be replaced. Even in this multitude of
friendly faces I look in vain for some which would on this day have been
lighted up with joy and kindness. I miss one venerable man, who, before
I was born, in evil times, in times of oppression and of corruption,
had adhered, with almost solitary fidelity, to the cause of freedom, and
whom I knew in advanced age, but still in the full vigour of mind and
body, enjoying the respect and gratitude of his fellow citizens. I
should, indeed, be most ungrateful if I could, on this day, forget Sir
James Craig, his public spirit, his judicious counsel, his fatherly
kindness to myself. And Jeffrey--with what an effusion of generous
affection he would on this day, have welcomed me back to Edinburgh! He
too is gone; but the remembrance of him is one of the many ties which
bind me to the city once dear to his heart, and still inseparably
associated with his fame.