I am not sure that this sumptuous Hall with which the generous Mr.
M’Ewan has endowed this University is in the nature of an unmixed
benefit. It makes too much of an occasion like this. To tell the truth,
as I look around me and see this vast audience, I am irresistibly
reminded of the most dismal moment that can occur in a man’s life,--the
moment when he is about to deliver a Rectorial Address. Happily,
there are one or two considerations which reassure me. One is, that
the altar is already lighted for another victim, whose sacrifice,
in the natural course of things, cannot long be delayed. My other
comfort, sir, is that you are in the chair, because, to put it on no
higher ground, the Chancellor is never present at a Rector’s Address.
The same firmament cannot hold two such planets, and therefore, when
I see you there, I am perfectly certain that the impression I derive
from this audience is an erroneous one, and that I am not going to
deliver a Rectorial Address. Well, sir, we welcome you here for every
reason. We are glad to see you in your place as Chancellor. We are
glad to see you on any plea in Edinburgh; and what I am happy to
think of is this: that we can ensure you in that chair for the next
fifty minutes what, perhaps, you can obtain nowhere else, a period of
unbroken repose, untroubled by colleagues, untroubled by Cabinets,
undisturbed even by boxes or telegrams; and if you, sir, will take
my advice, you will take advantage of that repose. But, gentlemen,
if I can explain why the Rector is not here, and why the Chancellor
is, it is perhaps more difficult to explain to myself why I am here.
It is partly, no doubt, because in an unwary moment I accepted this
responsible office, which has such onerous duties. But it is also
due to another circumstance,--that, when we were last in this Hall,
you invited me, somewhat clamorously, to address you. I am a person,
however, accustomed to walk in the established order of things: I
could not interrupt the programme. It would neither have been _dulce_
nor _decorum_ for me to speak on that occasion. But to-night I am
here to respond to that invitation. To-night, it is perhaps _decorum_
that I should speak; and if it can ever be _dulce_ to make a speech,
it is _dulce_ on this occasion. But, at any rate, let us be quite
clear in our understanding. I am not going to deliver a Rectorial
Address--nothing so elaborate, nothing so educational. Simply, I trust,
it will be a short speech on common-sense lines, and without rising to
the heights of the other occasion to which I have alluded.
[E] The Right Hon. Arthur Balfour, M.P., who was in the chair.
Now, sir, with a view to the adequate performance of my functions
to-night, I have been reading the address of my predecessor, our
friend Professor Masson, and as I am quite sure that you have all read
Professor Masson’s address too, it will not be necessary on this
occasion to condescend upon details. You know more than I do about the
constitution of these Societies, and you may perhaps be able--which
I am not--to decide as to their relative antiquity. But there is one
sinister and significant sentence in Professor Masson’s address to
which I commend your attention. He says that for sixteen years the
post of President was vacant, because no one could be found willing
to accept the responsibility of delivering the Presidential Address.
Now, if that does not move your compassion for the person who has that
courage, your hearts must be harder than adamant. There is another
sentence which produced a great awe and effect upon my mind. It is
said that the Societies had done much good work which did not seem
affected materially by the absence or the presence of their President,
and as specimen of that good work he said that no less than twenty
thousand essays had been delivered to the Societies in the course
of their existence. Twenty thousand essays! That is a hard saying.
Twenty thousand essays, blown into space! And it leads further to this
appalling calculation, that if a gentleman hearing of the Associated
Societies had determined to improve his mind by reading these essays,
and had determined to read one every day before breakfast, it would
have been sixty years before he had accomplished the task. Now, that
to me, I confess, is not the precious fact in connection with these
Societies. What to me is precious is this, that they garnered up so
much of what is illustrious, both in regard to memories and to men in
connection with Edinburgh. Take, for example, the Dialectic Society,
which was founded in 1787. Well, how brilliant was Edinburgh in 1787!
A race was growing up in your schools and in your universities which
was destined afterwards, through the means of the _Edinburgh Review_,
to influence largely both the taste and the policy of these islands.
They were at that time pretty young, the most of them. Cockburn--Lord
Cockburn--was being flogged every ten days at the High School, every
ten days according to a minute and pathetic calculation that he has
left behind him. Jeffrey--Lord Jeffrey--was at that time entering
Glasgow University in his fourteenth year; and as for Lord Brougham, he
was at that moment commencing a career of conflict by a struggle with
a master of his class, in which, I need hardly say, Brougham came off
victorious. Dugald Stewart was lecturing at that time, not merely to
Edinburgh, but to the kingdom, and almost to the world at large, and
Edinburgh was the centre to which all the intellect of Great Britain
might, without exaggeration, be said to have gravitated. At that time
the English universities were slumbering. Jeffrey had indeed taken a
taste of Oxford, but liked it not. His biographer carefully says that
“his College was not distinguished by study and propriety alone.”
This shocked Jeffrey, and he left it. But in any case these were the
golden days of Edinburgh. It was then unrivalled as an intellectual
centre, unrivalled in a sense that it can never be again. Some will
say that all that is gone. Well, as for the intellectual supremacy,
that could not survive in the general awakening of the world. But what
I also fear has gone, is the resident, inherent originality which
then distinguished our city. Railways and the Press have made that
impossible; for, after all, true originality can scarcely exist but in
the backwaters of life. The great ocean of life smooths and rolls its
pebbles to too much the same shape and texture. Those famous judges
of whom we read, with something between a smile and a tear,--Braxfield
and Eskgrove and Newton and Hermand,--are just as impossible in
these days as the black bottles with which they stimulated their
judicial attention on the bench. They are as impossible as that cry of
“Gardez-loo” which meant so much to the passer-by on the streets. Well,
after all, we must take the rough with the smooth, and the good with
the bad. “Gardez-loo” itself was only the symbol of hideous physical
impurities, which we none of us should regret; and perhaps even some
of those social glories, over which we are so accustomed to gloat in
the past, might not have been entirely agreeable had we to realize them
in the present. Take these old judges whom I mentioned. They are very
picturesque and interesting figures; but I am not sure that any of us
could have faced them in the character of a defendant or an accused
person without a qualm, more especially if we were opposed to them
in politics, and even--if tradition lies not--even if we were their
opponents at chess. And if we were in that unfortunate and perhaps
discreditable position, we should go and seek our legal adviser, not,
as now, in the decorous recesses of Queen Street or of George Street,
but, as Colonel Mannering went to seek him, at Clerihugh’s, enjoying
“high jinks” in the midst of a carousal, from which he could hardly
tear himself for matters of the most vital import to his client.
Well, of course it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of
His Time”--and I hope that you all do read it, and read it at least
once a year, because no resident of Edinburgh can properly enjoy his
city without reading Lord Cockburn once a year--it is impossible
to read Lord Cockburn without seeing that he was an optimist. But
even he says of the Edinburgh of his time--which he says was so
unrivalled--even he describes it as “always thirsty and unwashed.”
Well, I am not quite sure when I read that description if we should
have thought the Edinburgh of 1787 as delightful as he did. I hardly
venture to risk myself in this line of conjecture. Should we all have
appreciated Jeffrey as much as he did? That must remain in the realms
of the unknowable and the unknown. But there is worse behind. There
is even treason talked about the divine Sir Walter Scott. In that
very delightful book which furnishes so much leisurely reading for
the Scotsman or the Scotswoman, or for anybody,--I mean “Memoirs of a
Highland Lady,”--I came upon this sentence, which I have never since
been able to digest. It says about Sir Walter Scott, “He went out very
little,” and, when he did go, that “he was not an agreeable gentleman,
sitting very silent, looking dull and listless unless an occasional
flash lit up his countenance. It was odd, but Sir Walter never had
the reputation in Edinburgh that he had elsewhere.” Gentlemen, I veil
my face; I cannot get over that, till I remember that a prophet is
never a prophet in his own country, and there may have been people,
even in Edinburgh, who did not think of Sir Walter as we do. But I do
not mention all these disagreeable considerations as sheer iconoclasm
and blasphemy. No, gentlemen, it is in a very different spirit that I
lay them before you. I lay them before you as with a sort of inward
groan. They are to me a sort of philosophic potsherd with which I
scrape myself. It is in the attempt to comfort myself for living
in the Edinburgh of the end of the nineteenth century, and not in
the Edinburgh of the eighteenth or the seventeenth or the sixteenth
centuries, that thus I endeavor to recall these things, and console
myself anew.
Well, I think then there are some circumstances which we should bear
in mind before we give way to the wish to exchange new Edinburgh for
old Edinburgh. At any rate, there are some circumstances that should
discount our enthusiasm. But, indeed, in any case it would not be
possible for us of the Associated Societies to concentrate all our
interest in Edinburgh as our forefathers did. In the first place, our
students, our members, are by no means all Scotsmen. They come from
England, and from all over the world. They come here, many of them,
to learn arts which they mean to practise and to exercise elsewhere,
so that it would be impossible for them to remain in Edinburgh; if
they did, indeed, I think that some professions in Edinburgh would be
somewhat glutted and overstocked. But, in the second place, there is
the railroad, which equally prevents it--the railroad, which has so
profoundly stirred up our people, which has so inspired them with the
fever of travel, makes concentration in our old capital impossible.
By thousands are the strangers that it brings in and takes out of
Edinburgh every day, and indeed, as regards its effect on our town,
it is something like that of the pipes which convey the water of some
hushed and inland loch away to the boisterous strife of cities, and
again away from the cities to the eternal ocean. The students of that
Edinburgh which was once so difficult to reach and to leave are now
whirled away into a thousand whirlpools of civilization; they can no
longer huddle around and try to blow up the embers of that ancient
Edinburgh which we can only revive in imagination. But of Edinburgh as
it exists--the historical, the beautiful, the inspiring--I trust they
have taken and are taking a deep draught and a long memory. They are
here at the most critical and the most fruitful period of their lives;
and sure am I that, whether they wish it or not, they will bear away
from this place a seal and a mark and a stamp which can leave them only
with life itself.
But, gentlemen, I go a little further in this sense, and I believe
that even if the students could remain in Edinburgh and concentrate
themselves here, it would be bad for Edinburgh and bad for Scotland,
but bad also for the Empire. We in Scotland wish to continue to mould
the Empire as we have in the past--and we have not moulded it by
stopping at home. Your venerable Principal is an instance in point.
And we have even a nearer object-lesson in two returning Viceroys from
Canada and from India: Aberdeen--from Canada, where he is by and by
to be replaced by a Minto; and Elgin--the second Elgin--from India.
Well, I say then that it is not the Edinburgh of Cockburn alone that I
wish you to bear in your thoughts to-night, but rather the Edinburgh
which has dispersed her sons all over the Empire, the assiduous mother
and foster-mother of the builders of our Empire. From the time of
Dundas, who almost populated India with Scotsmen, that has always
been the function of Scotland; and I look, then, to my colleagues of
the Associated Societies not merely as going forth to their several
professions and callings in life, but as going forth as potential
empire-builders, or at least as empire-maintainers.
You will, gentlemen, when you go forth from these learned precincts and
enter upon the actual business of life--you will have in the course of
your lives to help to maintain and to build that Empire. You may think
that it may be in a small and insignificant manner, not more than
the coral insect within the coral reef. But recollect that the insect
is essential to the reef; and it is not for any man of himself to
measure what his direct utility may be to his country. I will tell you
why you must in your way exercise those functions. The British Empire
is not a centralized empire. It does not, as other empires, hinge on
a single autocrat or even on a single Parliament, but it is a vast
collection of communities spread all over the world, many with their
own legislatures, but all with their own governments, and, therefore,
resting, in a degree which is known in no other state of which history
has record, on the intelligence and the character of the individuals
who compose it. Some empires have rested on armies, and some on
constitutions. It is the boast of the British Empire that it rests on
men. For that reason it is that I speak to you to-night as men who are
to have your share in the work of the Empire, small or great, humble or
proud. That is--unless you go absolutely downwards--your irresistible
and irrevocable function. Now, it is quite true that your share in
that work may not be official, but even then I would ask, why not?
There never was in the history of Great Britain, or, I suspect, of
the world, so great a call as now upon the energies and intelligence
of men for the public service, and that call, as you, sir, know, is
increasing daily. Within Great Britain in my own memory the change in
that respect has been very remarkable. What was called the governing
class--and which is to some extent the governing class still--when I
was a boy had very simple public functions in comparison with those
which devolve upon the present race. They went into Parliament as a
rule, and they had Quarter Sessions. But Parliament in those days was a
very different business from what it is now, and Quarter Sessions--were
Quarter Sessions. The burden of Parliament has now indefinitely and
almost hopelessly increased, as you, sir, I doubt not, would be willing
to depose on oath, if necessary. That takes up for these islands some
five hundred and seventy more or less trained intelligences. Then
there is the House of Lords, which takes up some--I am not sure of the
figures--some five or six hundred more. I do not wish to claim that
the House of Lords takes up the whole time of its members; I merely
wish to point out that that, again, takes a part of the time, at any
rate, of some five or six hundred more of our governing class. Then
there is a new institution--the London County Council. That is a body
whose work is not less absorbing than that of the House of Commons. It
lasts much longer; it is much more continuous, and though not nearly
so obtrusive, it is quite as arduous. Well, that consists of a small
body of a hundred and thirty-eight members, who must all, who should
all, be highly qualified for the function of governing a nation which
is not smaller than many self-governing kingdoms. Then there are the
great municipalities--great and small. These, no doubt, have to some
extent always existed, but not in their present form. A new spirit
has been breathed into these somewhat dry bones. The functions of
a municipality are sought by men of the highest intelligence; they
are not merely sought by men of the highest intelligence, but absorb
a very great proportion of the time of these men. They are changed
altogether in spirit and in extent. And it is notable now to remark
how many men in business plead as a just excuse from entering either
the House of Commons or municipal work that they cannot spare the time
from the necessary prosecution of their business which would enable
them to join in those absorbing avocations. The municipalities of
to-day--I know not how many men whose time they absorb, but they are
very different from the municipalities of my boyhood, and I suspect
that if a Town Councillor of forty or fifty years ago were to present
himself in a Town Council of to-day, he would regard their work with
astonishment, and they perhaps might look at him with some surprise.
Then there are County Councils, District Councils, Parish Councils--all
bodies new within the last few years--not all of them absorbing the
whole time of their members, but requiring, at any rate, the services
of many trained intelligences to keep their work in proper order, and
without arrears. Then there are the Government Departments, which
swallow up more and more men, and pass them on very often to higher
employments. Their work is indefinitely and incalculably increasing. I
will give you one symptom. The Foreign Office this year has obtained
one new Under-Secretary; and the addition of an Under-Secretary is
a cry of distress indeed. Well, the Colonial Office, I see from the
papers, is also about to demand an Under-Secretary, and what that means
of increase in the subordinate departments is more than I can rightly
calculate. But in truth, gentlemen, the whole matter is typified in the
constitution of the Cabinet. The present Cabinet requires nineteen men
to do what was done by half-a-dozen in the days of Mr. Pitt.
Why do I quote these figures? I quote them to show the enormous drain
that the State makes on our intelligent population, besides the drain
that it makes both for military and naval purposes. Napoleon was said
to drain his population for his warlike purposes. We may be said, if
not to drain, at least to skim ours very frequently for the purpose
of administration. Now what I have been telling you relates to Great
Britain alone. There is, besides, Ireland. Well, I am not going to
touch on Ireland. In the first place, it is a different system of
administration, and one with which I am not so conversant; and, in
the second place, this is at present a harmonious meeting, and I have
discovered that there is no topic so likely to terminate the harmony of
a meeting as that of the administration or the government of Ireland.
I pass beyond that. Outside Great Britain and Ireland there is an
enormous drain on our population for administrative purposes. There
is India, which takes so many of our young men and trains them so
incomparably for every sort of administrative work. There is Egypt,
which, is, of course, on a different footing, but which is also very
large in her requirements. There is Africa,--not self-governing Africa,
but the rest of our Africa,--with its territories, its spheres of
influence, and so on, all requiring men to mould them into shape, not
necessarily men belonging to the Civil Service or men of formula, but
muscular Christians, who are ready to turn their hands to anything.
Then, besides that and beyond that there are the outer Britains, if I
may so call them, the great common-wealths outside these Islands which
own the British Crown--whether Crown Colonies, in which case they
require administrators, or self-governing Colonies, in which case they
require the whole appurtenance of Parliament, Courts of Law, Ministers,
and so forth. Then, outside that again, there are our Diplomatic and
Consular services. Well, I do not suppose there ever was in the history
of the World half the demand that there is at this hour within the
British Empire for young men of ability and skill and training to help
to mould that Empire into shape. Never were there so many paths of
distinction open within that Empire; while to those who would share in
that task of empire-building, and who would do it, not with the hope of
amassing much riches, but in a high missionary spirit, never was there
such an opportunity as opens at the present moment.
Of course, the base of all this tremendous work of Government is our
unparalleled Civil Service. Our Civil Service is our glory and our
pride. It is the admiration of all foreigners who see it, but it is,
and I think I can appeal to you, sir--it is much more the admiration
of those who as political Ministers are called upon to witness its
working from within. They constitute the wheels and the springs on
which moves the great Juggernaut Car of the State, and if these were
once to get out of order, it would be an evil day indeed for Great
Britain. But I confess, in my day dreams I have sometimes wished to add
to them one other department. I have sometimes wished that there was
a department entirely devoted to training young men for the task of
administration--men who would afterwards be ready to go anywhere and
do anything at a moment’s notice--be ready to go out and administer
Uganda, for example, at a week’s notice, ready to go and report
anywhere on maladministration with the skill of an expert, able to
investigate any subject and report upon it, not in the sense of Royal
Commissions, but in a summary and a business-like manner. I should
like them, as I say, to go at a word from their superior to any part
of the Empire, and be able to do anything, as the militant orders of
monasticism used to do--and do now, for aught I know--at the command
of their superiors; to be, in fact, a sort of general staff of the
Empire. I believe if that could be done it would be an incalculable
gain; though I know it is a dream. But then I also know that it is not
a bad thing sometimes to dream dreams. Of course, to some extent this
function is performed by the Treasury. The Treasury, from its necessary
contact with all the other Departments, owing to its being alone able
to furnish them with that financial staff of life without which they
could not get on, a staff of life which could only be obtained from
the Treasury--not always with a smile--does furnish to the other
Departments men who are competent to do most things, and to undertake
most duties. But that, unfortunately, has been already discovered.
Already men have been constantly taken from the Treasury, and if that
process be continued much longer that Department will, I fear, be left
in what I believe is scientifically called an anæmic condition. Well,
gentlemen, I admit that this is a digression as well as a dream, but
my point is this, that there never was so great a demand as now for
trained intelligence and trained character in our public service, and I
should like to think that we of the Associated Societies will bear our
part in it.
Most of you, I suppose, have already chosen the professions that you
mean to pursue, and I should by no means wish to see, as the result
of what I have said, a general exodus from Edinburgh to the somewhat
forbidding portals of the Civil Service examiners. That is not my
object, but I venture to point out that official duty is only a
very small part of public duty, and that public work is by no means
incompatible with other professions and other callings. I do not
suppose I need remind you that Walter Scott was a sheriff, and that
Robert Burns was an exciseman. But how often have I seen professional
men clutch at an opportunity of serving their country, whether on a
commission or on a committee, or something of that kind--clutch at
it though knowing that it will involve a great waste of time, and
therefore a great loss of money--clutch at it as an honor which they
cannot sufficiently prize. And I confess, when I see the enormous
abilities that are given to our Civil Service and to our public
service, either for no remuneration at all, or for remuneration
incalculably smaller than the same abilities would have earned in any
other calling or profession, I am inclined to think that the public
spirit in this country was never higher nor brighter than it is at
present. Let me tell you two curious stories which happened within
my experience or knowledge with regard to this anxiety to serve the
public. A friend of mine who had a high post in the Civil Service
was asked, not so very long ago, to undertake some task which was
peculiarly congenial to him, and for which he was peculiarly fitted;
but he refused it without hesitation, and he gave as his reason this.
He said, “When I was appointed to my present post at a very ample
remuneration I knew nothing of the work, and it was some years before I
could learn the work, to do it to my satisfaction. Now I have learned
it, I am in a position in some way to repay the State for what it has
done for me, and I shall not leave my post till I feel I have in some
degree discharged that debt.” Well, now, a much longer time ago, before
I can remember, there was one of the greatest and the wealthiest, and
at the same time one of the most dissipated of the English nobility,
who, after a life spent, as I say, in a very frivolous manner, was
suddenly seized and bitten with the anxiety to occupy some public
post under his government, and do some public work; and he applied to
the Minister of the day for some quite subordinate post, as he wished
to do something to redeem his life. Well, the post was refused, and
his life was unredeemed. I give that to you as a specimen, not so
uncommon as it may seem, of the anxiety of men, who had not done much
in their youth, as they approached middle life to be of some use to
their country before they die. And, after all, gentlemen, we are bound
to remember this--that we owe something to our country besides rates
and taxes. Other countries have compulsory military service. We are
released from that; and if only on that consideration I think that
we should be prepared to do something for the country which has done
so much for us. And even if there is no public work ready to your
hand, there are innumerable ways in which we can serve our country,
however humbly and however indirectly. I only mention in passing the
Volunteer movement. But there are social methods, literary methods,
ay, and even athletic methods, because I am one of those who believe
that one of the subordinate methods of welding the Empire together,
and even of welding the English-speaking races together, is by those
Inter-Colonial athletic contests, and athletic contests with the United
States, which are developing so much in these days. But what I want to
impress upon you is this, that if you keep before you the high motive
of serving your country, it will ennoble the humblest acts that you do
for her. The man who breaks stones on the road, after all, is serving
his country in some way. He is making her roads better for her commerce
and her traffic. And if a man asks himself sincerely and constantly
the question--“What can I do, in however small a way, to serve my
country?”--he will not be long in finding an answer.
Now, I will tell you what I consider the irreducible minimum of this
service--the irreducible minimum. It is that you should keep a close
and vigilant eye on public and municipal affairs; that you should
form intelligent opinions upon them; that you should give help to
the men who seem to you worthy of help, and oppose the men whom you
think worthy of opposition and condemnation. That I believe to be the
irreducible minimum of the debt of a British citizen to his country,
and I believe it to be very important to the country. There is no such
bad sign in a country as political abstention. I do not want you all
to be militant politicians; I do not want it for your sake, or for the
country’s sake. But an intelligent interest does not mean a militant
interest, though it, at any rate, means the reversal of apathy. We are
told that there is a good deal of political apathy in these days. I do
not know whether that is so or not, because I have no means of judging.
But if there is political apathy, I think the cause of it is not far to
seek. Our forefathers, with their defective news agencies or channels,
were able to concentrate their mind on one particular subject at a
time, and give it all their energy and all their zeal. For example, for
some twenty years they were locked in that great war with Napoleon
and the French Revolution, which absorbed all their energies, and when
that war ceased there came an era of great single questions, on which
they were able to concentrate all their attention. But now that is all
changed. The telegraph brings you into communication with every quarter
of the globe. Every day brings you news of some exciting character from
every quarter of the universe, and under this constant and varying
pressure the intelligence of men is apt to be dazed, and blunted, and
dulled. And yet we know that when, as now, the attention of the country
is concentrated on a single point, there is as little apathy as need be.
But I should not appeal even on these grounds to you, gentlemen, if I
did not hold a somewhat higher and broader conception of the Empire
than seems to be held in many quarters. If I regarded the Empire simply
as a means of painting so much of the world red, or as an emporium for
trade, I should not ask you to work for it. The land hunger is apt to
become land fever, and land fever is apt to breed land indigestion,
while trade, however important and desirable in itself, can never be
the sole foundation of an empire. Empires founded on trade alone must
irresistibly crumble. But the Empire that is sacred to me is sacred
for this reason, that I believe it to be the noblest example yet known
to mankind of free, adaptable, just government. If that was only your
or my opinion it might perhaps be not very well worth having, but it
derives singular confirmation from outside. When a community is in
distress or under oppression, it always looks first to Great Britain;
while in cases which are quite unsuspected, I think, by Great Britain
at large, and which are, as a rule, only known to Ministers, they
constantly express the wish in some form or other to be united to our
country, and to enjoy our government. And, on the other hand, for the
most part, in those territories which, for one reason or another, we
have at various times ceded, we may, I think, in almost every case
see signs of deterioration, and signs of regret on the part of the
inhabitants for what they have lost. I ask you, then, gentlemen, to
keep this motive before you of public duty and public service, for the
sake of the Empire, and also on your own account. You will find it, I
believe, the most ennobling human motive that can guide your actions.
And while you will help the country by observing it, you will also help
yourselves. Life in itself is but a poor thing at best; it consists of
only two certain parts, the beginning and the end--the birth and the
grave. Between those two points lies the whole area of human choice and
human opportunity. You may embellish and consecrate it if you will,
or you may let it lie stagnant and dead. But if you choose the better
part, I believe that nothing will give your life so high a complexion
as to study to do something for your country. And with that inspiration
I would ask you to blend some memory of this Edinburgh so sacred and
so beautiful to us, not, perhaps, the Edinburgh of Cockburn or Jeffrey
or Brougham, but an Edinburgh yet full of noble men and wise teachers,
that you will bear away some kindling memory of this old grey city,
which, though it be not the capital of the Empire, is yet, in the sense
of the sacrifices that it has made, and the generations of men that it
has given to the Empire, in the truest, the largest, and the highest
sense an Imperial City.