Archives: Tales

I AM entrusted with a toast which you can easily see demands somewhat cautious handling; for I cannot hide from you that the Houses of Parliament are very largely political in their nature. This has not always been the case. When the Kingdom of Sussex was a sovereign independent State a few hundred years ago, the South Saxons regarded what we should call politics as much less important than piracy, navigation, trade, and sport. On the rare occasions when they interested themselves in politics, the Member for Lewes was as likely as not to record his vote against the hon. Member for Brighthelmstone with an axe or a sword. This method, though conclusive, was found to be wasteful, owing to the expense of repeated bye-elections. The survivors of the debates compromised at last on the counting of heads on a division instead of breaking them. There is much to be said for either plan. If you break heads, you at least discover what is inside them; if you count them, you have to take what is inside them on trust. If you take them on trust you get this whole business of politics as we know it to-day.But there were certain things which our ancestors dared not take on trust. Courage in war; wisdom in council; skill in administration, ability to sway men; wealth, and craft; were matters which they knew by bitter experience lay at the roots of their national existence. Therefore, when they found a man conspicuously endowed with one or other of these qualities they promoted him, regardless of his birth or antecedents, to the inner council of picked men which from time immemorial has stood next to the King in our Anglo-Saxon Constitution. In doing this our forefathers recognised several things which we, perhaps, overlook. Our fathers created the State. The State did not create our fathers. They knew that men would not work to the utmost for any ambition that is bound by the term of their own little lives, but some men will work for the permanence of their own houses, and for the honour of their sons who come after them. So they said: “Let the son of the picked man succeed to his father’s place in the council when his father dies”. They knew that the son of a picked man, if he is any good at all, is often very valuably equipped with the results of his father’s experience and observations, which he has absorbed unconsciously, in his youth, precisely as the son of a Thames pilot picks up marks and soundings.

If such a man were no good, our ancestors knew he would disappear more quickly from the assembly of the picked men than he would from an ordinary crowd, where the standard of success and the penalties for failure were lower. If he were neither good nor bad, but average, he was, by virtue of his position, independent; and our ancestors may have noticed that they were more likely to get unbiased judgement on a question of public policy from an average independent man than from a very clever one who had something to gain or lose by his answer. Achievement which benefits the kingdom; heredity which gives responsibility and incentive to renewed achievement; independence which inspires fearless advice — these things were vitally important when England was in the making: and surely we have in these things the beginning of the House of Lords. Generation after generation, that Assembly has been recruited from proven capacity in every walk of life to serve the needs of the day according to the standards of the day. The needs and the standards have changed, and to meet them the position of the House has changed too. One-quarter of the present peerage has been created within the last thirty years, since the old road to Rottingdean was shut. One-half of it has come into existence since the foundation-stone of Brighton Town Hall was laid by Mr. Kemp in 1830.

Yet, in essence, the House of Lords is what it was from the first—a body of democratic aristocrats, chosen after trial and observation out of an aristocratic democracy to guard the permanent life of the nation—that inner political life of the race which is very little affected by legislation. Now if aristocracy implies the wealth of inherited tradition, if heredity means the instinct of accumulated experience, then is the House of Commons, equally with the House of Lords, aristocratic and hereditary. Lest there should be any doubt in the matter, it has surrounded itself with an etiquette which would be extreme in a Spanish court; which exacts a deference which would be extravagant at the footstool of a Caesar. Yet it conserves to its members a toleration that would be noticeable in members of a club. There is nothing that a Member of Parliament may not do so long as he respects the written and unwritten laws of the House. This is an excellent tradition, for it is one thing to advocate the repudiation of the National Debt or the abolition of the Navy at sympathetic street-corners; it is quite another thing to explain how you would achieve your ends before an audience of your equals, who may or may not back your sentiments, but who would certainly call you to order if you put on your hat or took it off at the wrong time. This insistence on ceremonial at first sight appears rather a bore, but, when you have to listen to speeches, boredom is an excellent touchstone of character. It is not the actual fighting that tries a man’s nerves so much as the waiting and being ordered about between the engagements.

Then, again, our forefathers were compelled to struggle hand-to-hand against people or institutions that wished to have more power in the State than was good for anyone concerned. The result of these experiences left Englishmen somewhat disinclined to be governed by any class or body, even by their own representatives in Parliament. Up till now, the national idea has been rather to choose capable men and to permit them to govern on the tacit understanding that they were not to govern too much. I suspect, then, that the elaborate ritual and complicated procedure of the House of Commons has been designed by the sense of the House as a barrier against the joys of unbridled legislation. Specialists, like experts, are not unprejudiced. The shoemaker says that there is nothing like leather; the doctor believes that the knife is life; I myself have a bias in favour of the pen; and the legislator is always in favour of making laws for Law’s sake. In spite of our precautions the statute-books of our country are full of laws regulating almost every fact and relation of the Englishman’s life, from the clothes he shall wear to the wages that he shall earn. Most of these laws are dead and inoperative, but the Englishman is still alive and waiting, but not anxiously, for more laws to be tried upon him. Our candid friends tell us that our reluctance to accept law-making as the finest of indoor sports is due to our apathy, our bourgeois nature, and our lack of imagination. Has not someone said or written that our race has been contented to slink through the centuries with no higher object than that of avoiding trouble?

If the charge be true, then “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”. We hold to-day one square mile in every four of the land of the globe, and through our representatives we are responsible for the protection of one person in five out of the entire population of this little planet. May we not be excused if, so far, we have avoided trouble within these limits? May we not be forgiven if we have not exercised our imagination on our fellow-subjects. May we not plead that in the course of our development we have abated the pretensions and cooled the imaginations of kings, churches, armies, mobs, and their leaders? We cannot foresee what the future may send against us, but remembering who and what our fathers were, and trusting our instincts, we may face that future, if not with a light heart, at least with a steady one.

WILL you permit me to speak in my dual capacity as a Doctor of your University and as a mere teller of stories? I cannot maintain arguments for the space of six weeks against all the learned Regents of the Sorbonne, as did the illustrious Pantagruel; but I venture to submit for your consideration this thèse Sorbonnique: That the nations of the world betray their essential characteristics and ideals more intimately and more precisely in the folk-tales which they tell to their children, than through any other medium. In public assemblies, man makes use of the lie proper to the occasion; but beside his own hearth, among his own family, he reveals unconsciously the absolute truth concerning all that he desires or fears. The folk-tales of a race never lie.

Now the ancient and immemorial fairy-tales of France and of England are of a charming simplicity. There is always a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune. On the road he is kind to a beggar, an old woman, or, perhaps a cat. This, though he knows it not, is a good investment. Very soon, he falls into the hands of giants or sorcerers. He is cast into prison, or compelled to perform impossible tasks. At that moment, the beggar, the old woman, or the cat whom he had befriended, comes to his rescue, tells him the magic word, that opens the prison door and achieves the impossible task; or gives him the magic sword which destroys the giants at one blow. In consequence, the youth possesses himself of all their treasure and, equally, he marries a Princess—that Princess which exists always in the dreams of youth. He becomes the Head of a Kingdom, and, in due course, the head of a family.

You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy-tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul? Thus:—

There was a young man, who through lucky investments, became a wealthy rentier, consolidated his social position by a desirable alliance, and founded a family. You may say that the ideal is bourgeois, but on the pursuit of that ideal, as our youth has pursued it eternally, is based an enormous proportion of the progress and the continuity of our civilisation. Therefore, in France and in England, which together compose the twin fortresses of European civilisation of to-day, our folk-tales prefigure our racial temperaments.

Every race betrays itself thus in the tales it tells to its own children. Let us examine elsewhere. From the earliest ages comes down to us from out of the North, inhabited by the tribes of the Teuton and the Tartar, a mass of legend and story, almost a literature in itself, which deals with the Wehr-Wolf—the beast that can at pleasure or for profit change itself into the likeness of a man and for pleasure or profit become again the Wolf. In these tales, a villager meets a traveller who asks him the way; a family sitting round their hearth by night hear at the door a woman seeking shelter from the storm. The traveller is guided, the woman is admitted into the house. Confidence is established. The traveller rests and works in the village; the woman, perhaps, marries there and bears children; but in time—in due time—these creatures out of the darkness and the night of the North, practise, furtively or openly, the rituals and sabbats of the pack to which they belong. There are mysterious attacks on men, women, and little children in the village. For a while no suspicion is aroused. Men do not suspect men of the outrages of beasts. Then arrives, by chance, the sudden discovery of the Wehr-Wolf in its proper shape, its fangs in the victim’s throat. It runs off through the forest and the snow, wounded, howling, but looking over its shoulder. The village resumes its life. In due time the cycle of treachery and terror is repeated in that village. The traveller reappears more abject, and the woman more in need of help than before. They are received by human beings as human beings. They wait their time; they kill and again depart. You in France have reason to know these stories.

I confess that when I first read them I was fascinated by the cold tenacity and the ruthlessness of the Wehr-Wolves, as much as I despised the stupidity of their victims. For in those days I believed, with the rest of the world, that such tales came out of the twilight of primitive savagery. I did not know then, as you and I know now, that they were the dawn and the forecast of a modern philosophy of Absolute Evil which has since been made plain in the face of all mankind. I did not think then, as I think now, that if our leaders had accepted the folk-tales in their children’s storybooks for a guide our world, to-day desolated, would have prepared against the Wolves before they came down from the North, and would have made sure also that the cycle of suspense, treachery, and terror would never repeat itself.

To-day, we have not that security. You in France are exposed still to the direct ravages of the wolves who are men. We in England, to the indirect, but therefore more dangerous, attacks of the men who are wolves. Both our nations know this in our hearts because both have suffered, but this knowledge is not yet the basis of our common actions. Why?

I am, by your grace, a Doctor of Letters; but were I a Doctor of Medicine, I would venture the theory that the very continuance and pressure of the agony through which mankind is passing, has driven many minds to create and invent, as a relief to their nerves, grandiose, meticulously regulated, but none the less nebulous, organisations, and ceremonials of Utopian administrations in the sincere belief that by virtue of the intensity of thought bestowed upon them, these fantasies will achieve the peace of which the world still seeks. It is a state of mind which, in my calling, produces what is known as the Literature of Escape—that is to say, when an artist, recoiling from the harsh face of life as it is takes refuge in depicting a life that never was.

But I hold that, precisely as this mood passes from the individual so also will it pass away from the nations. In England at the present moment situations and opinions are controlled by those who not having foreseen war are perhaps the less capable to complete peace. But behind them are the men who stand upon the threshold of the councils of the nation; whose education to that end commenced seven years ago by the side of your own sons. These men desire for the future, above all, that elementary justice and reasoned safety against the wolves from the North for which they gave themselves in the past on the field of battle. Remember the association there of France and of England was no easy and unbroken progress towards overwhelming triumph. Such dreams exist only in the minds of races who have always exploited but never begotten a civilisation. With us it was otherwise. There was no anxiety, no humiliation, no compromise, no defeat, no catastrophe, and no splendour of recovery which the sons of France and England did not experience together from the first to the last days of the Gehenna through which they came.

And in that mutual realisation of the best and the worst, that sacred brotherhood of common life, shared by all the manhood of each race lies our strength for the future—a strength which neither our own weakness nor the devices of the enemy to work upon our weaknesses can ultimately shake.

For the present, France and England are still wandering in the confusion of the No Man’s Land that lies between the old world and the new. The Commands there are still sending out patrols in all directions which naturally impede each other. The very ground, on which we meet for our conference, is cicatrised with old trenches and sown with the traps and mines left by the enemy. But have patience. Though it be a heavier burden even than war—have patience!

For thirty generations, France and England in secular but fruitful conflict have engendered and sustained a civilisation which has been attacked by an immense and highly organised barbarism. It is threatened now not only by a recrudescence of that barbarism, impenitent and energetic as ever, but by the world-weakening reaction that has overtaken us after our prodigious battle. For that we, who know each other, must make allowance. One cannot resume a broken world as easily as one can resume a broken sentence. But before long, our sons who have spent themselves in suffering and toiling to abolish the menace of barbarism, will recover also from the menace of moral lassitude; and will re-establish together the foundations of the peace of the world, not on pious dreams or amiable hopes, but on those ancient virtues of logic, sanity and laboriousness with which her history and her own indomitable genius have dowered France.

A GREAT, and I frankly admit, a somewhat terrifying, honour has come to me; but I think, compliments apart, that the most case-hardened worker in letters, speaking to such an assembly as this, must recognise the gulf that separates even the least of those who do things worthy to be written about from even the best of those who have written things worthy of being talked about.There is an ancient legend which tells us that when a man first achieved a most notable deed he wished to explain to his Tribe what he had done. As soon as he began to speak, however, he was smitten with dumbness, he lacked words, and sat down. Then there arose—according to the story—a masterless man, one who had taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues, but who was afflicted—that is the phrase—with the magic of the necessary word. He saw; he told; he described the merits of the notable deed in such a fashion, we are assured, that the words “became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all his hearers”. Thereupon, the Tribe seeing that the words were certainly alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down untrue tales about them to their children, took and killed him. But, later, they saw that the magic was in the words, not in the man.

We have progressed in many directions since the time of this early and destructive criticism, but, so far, we do not seem to have found a sufficient substitute for the necessary word as the final record to which all achievement must look. Even to-day, when all is done, those who have done it must wait until all has been said by the masterless man with the words. It is certain that the overwhelming bulk of those words will perish in the future as they have perished in the past; but it is true that a minute fraction will continue to exist, and by the light of these words, and by that light only, will our children be able to judge of the phases of our generation. Now we desire beyond all things to stand well with our children; but when our story comes to be told we do not know who will have the telling of it. We are too close to the tellers; there are many tellers and they are all talking together; and, even if we know them, we must not kill them. But the old and terrible instinct which taught our ancestors to kill the original story-teller warns us that we shall not be far wrong if we challenge any man who shows signs of being afflicted with the magic of the necessary word. May not this be the reason why, without any special legislation on its behalf, Literature has always stood a little outside the law as the one calling that is absolutely free — free in the sense that it needs no protection? For instance, if, as occasionally happens, a Judge makes a bad law, or a surgeon a bad operation, or a manufacturer makes bad food, criticism upon their actions is by law and custom confined to comparatively narrow limits. But if a man, as occasionally happens, makes a book, there is no limit to the criticism that may be directed against it. And this is perfectly as it should be. The world recognises that little things like bad law, bad surgery, and bad food, affect only the cheapest commodity that we know about—human life. Therefore, in these circumstances, men can afford to be swayed by pity for the offender, by interest in his family, by fear, or loyalty, or respect for the organisation he represents, or even by a desire to do him justice. But when the question is of words—words that may become alive and walk up and down in the hearts of the hearers—it is then that this world of ours, which is disposed to take an interest in its future, feels instinctively that it is better that a thousand innocent people should be punished rather than that one guilty word should be preserved, carrying that which is an untrue tale of the Tribe. The chances, of course, are almost astronomically remote that any given tale will survive for so long as it takes an oak to grow to timber size. But that guiding instinct warns us not to trust to chance a matter of the supremest concern. In this durable record, if anything short of indisputable and undistilled truth be seen there, we all feel, “How shall our achievements profit us?” The Record of the Tribe is its enduring literature.

The magic of Literature lies in the words, and not in any man. Witness, a thousand excellent, strenuous words can leave us quite cold or put us to sleep, whereas a bare half-hundred words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago, can still lead whole nations into and out of captivity, can open to us the doors of the three worlds, or stir us so intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own souls. It is a miracle—one that happens very seldom. But secretly each one of the masterless men with the words has hope, or has had hope, that the miracle may be wrought again through him.

And why not? If a tinker in Bedford gaol; if a pamphleteering shopkeeper, pilloried in London; if a muzzy Scot; if a despised German Jew; or a condemned French thief, or an English Admiralty official with a taste for letters can be miraculously afflicted with the magic of the necessary word, why not any man at any time? Our world, which is only concerned in the perpetuation of the record, sanctions that hope just as kindly and just as cruelly as Nature sanctions love.

All it suggests is that the man with the Words shall wait upon the man of achievement, and step by step with him try to tell the story to the tribe. All it demands is that the magic of every word shall be tried out to the uttermost by every means, fair or foul, that the mind of man can suggest. There is no room, and the world insists that there shall be no room, for pity, for mercy, for respect, for fear, or even for loyalty between man and his fellow-man, when the record of the Tribe comes to be written. That record must satisfy, at all costs to the word and to the man behind the word. It must satisfy alike the keenest vanity and the deepest self-knowledge of the present; it must satisfy also the most shameless curiosity of the future. When it has done this it is literature of which it will be said, in due time, that it fitly represents its age. I say in due time because ages, like individuals, do not always appreciate the merits of a record that purports to represent them. The trouble is that one always expects just a little more out of a thing than one puts into it. Whether it be an age or an individual, one is always a little pained and a little pessimistic to find that all one gets back is just one’s bare deserts. This is a difficulty old as literature.

A little incident that came within my experience a while ago shows that that difficulty is always being raised by the most unexpected people all about the world. It happened in a land where the magic of words is peculiarly potent and far-reaching, that there was a Tribe that wanted rain, and the rain-doctors set about getting it. To a certain extent the rain-doctors succeeded. But the rain their magic brought was not a full driving downpour that tells of large prosperity; it was patchy, local, circumscribed, and uncertain. There were unhealthy little squalls blowing about the country and doing damage. Whole districts were flooded out by waterspouts, and other districts annoyed by trickling showers, soon dried by the sun. And so the Tribe went to the rain-doctors, being very angry, and they said, “What is this rain that you make? You did not make rain like this in the time of our fathers. What have you been doing?” And the rain-doctors said, “We have been making our proper magic. Supposing you tell us what you have been doing lately?” And the Tribe said, “Oh, our head-men have been running about hunting jackals, and our little people have been running about chasing grasshoppers! What has that to do with your rain-making?” “It has everything to do with it,” said the rain-doctors. “Just as long as your head-men run about hunting jackals, and just as long as your little people run about chasing grasshoppers, just so long will the rain fall in this manner.

GENTLEMEN—It may not have escaped your professional observation that there are only two classes of mankind in the world—doctors and patients. I have had some delicacy in confessing that I have belonged to the patient class ever since a doctor told me that all patients were phenomenal liars where their own symptoms were concerned. If I dared to take advantage of this magnificent opportunity which now is before me I should like to talk to you all about my own symptoms. However, I have been ordered—on medical advice—not to talk about patients, but doctors. Speaking, then, as a patient, I should say that the average patient looks upon the average doctor very much as the non-combatant looks upon the troops fighting on his behalf. The more trained men there are between his body and the enemy the better.I have had the good fortune this afternoon of meeting a number of trained men who, in due time, will be drafted into your permanently mobilised Army which is always in action, always under fire against death. Of course, it is a little unfortunate that Death, as the senior practitioner, is bound to win in the long run; but we noncombatants, we patients, console ourselves with the idea that it will be your business to make the best terms you can with Death on our behalf; to see how his attacks can be longest delayed or diverted, and, when he insists on driving the attack home, to see that he does it according to the rules of civilised warfare. Every sane human being is agreed that this long-drawn fight for time that we call life is one of the most important things in the world. It follows, therefore, that you, who control and oversee this fight, and who will reinforce it, must be amongst the most important people in the world. Certainly the world will treat you on that basis. It has long ago decided that you have no working hours which anybody is bound to respect, and nothing except your extreme bodily illness will excuse you in its eyes from refusing to help a man who thinks he may need your help at any hour of the day or night. Nobody will care whether you are in your bed, or in your bath, or at the theatre. If any one of the children of men has a pain or a hurt in him you will be summoned; and, as you know, what little vitality you may have accumulated in your leisure will be dragged out of you again.

In all time of flood, fire, famine, plague, pestilence, battle, murder, and sudden death it will be required of you that you report for duty at once, and go on duty at once, and that you stay on duty until your strength fails you or your conscience relieves you; whichever may be the longer period. This is your position—these are some of your obligations—and I do not think that they will grow any lighter. Have you heard of any legislation to limit your output? Have you heard of any Bill for an eight hours’ day for doctors? Do you know of any change in public opinion which will allow you not to attend a patient when you know that the man never means to pay you? Have you heard any outcry against those people who can really afford surgical appliances, and yet cadge round the hospitals for free advice, a cork leg, or a glass eye? I am afraid you have not.

It seems to be required of you that you must save others. It is nowhere laid down that you need save yourselves. That is to say, you belong to the privileged classes. I am sorry you have met my demonstration with a certain amount of levity. May I remind you of some of your privileges? You and Kings are the only people whose explanation the Police will accept if you exceed the legal limit in your car. On presentation of your visiting-card you can pass through the most turbulent crowd unmolested and even with applause. If you fly a yellow flag over a centre of population you can turn it into a desert. If you choose to fly a Red Cross flag over a desert you can turn it into a centre of population towards which, as I have seen, men will crawl on hands and knees. You can forbid any ship to enter any port in the world. If you think it necessary to the success of any operation in which you are interested, you can stop a 20,000-ton liner with mails in mid-ocean till the operation is concluded. You can tie up the traffic of a port without notice given. You can order whole quarters of a city to be pulled down or burnt up; and you can trust to the armed co-operation of the nearest troops to see that your prescriptions are properly carried out.

To do us poor patients justice, we do not often dispute doctor’s orders unless we are frightened or upset by a long continuance of epidemic diseases. In this case, if we are uncivilised, we say that you have poisoned the drinking-water for your own purposes, and we turn out and throw stones at you in the street. If we are civilised we do something else: but civilised people can throw stones too. You have been, and always will be, exposed to the contempt of the gifted amateur—the gentleman who knows by intuition everything that it has taken you years to learn. You have been exposed—you will always be exposed—to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world’s most bitter agonies—those people who would limit, and cripple, and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering. But you have heard this afternoon a little of the history of your profession. You will find that such people have been with you—or, rather, against you—from the very beginning, ever since, I should say, the earliest Egyptians erected images in honour of cats—and dogs—on the banks of the Nile. Yet your work goes on, and will go on.

You remain now, perhaps, the only class that cares to tell the world that we can get no more out of a machine than we put into it; that if the fathers have eaten forbidden fruit, the children’s teeth are very liable to be affected. Your training shows you, daily and hourly, that things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be, and that we can deceive no one except ourselves when we pretend otherwise. Better still, you can prove what you have learned. If a patient chooses to disregard your warnings, you have not to wait a generation to convince him. You know you will be called in in a few days or weeks, and you will find your careless friend with a pain in his inside or a sore place on his body, precisely as you warned him would be the case. Have you ever considered what a tremendous privilege that is? At a time when few things are called by their right names—when it is against the Spirit of the Time even to hint that an act may entail consequences—you are going to join a profession in which you will be paid for telling a man the truth, and every departure you may make from the truth you will make as a concession to man’s bodily weakness, and not to your own mental weakness.

Realising these things, I do not think I need stretch your patience by talking to you about the high ideals and lofty ethics of a profession which exacts from its followers the largest responsibility and the highest death-rate—for its practitioners—of any profession in the world. If you will let me, I will wish you in your future what all men desire—enough work to do, and strength enough to do the work.

YOU must remember that an Englishman looks on the record of Edinburgh University, not with fear, but with envy. Your University represents sacredly and intimately the natural expression of the genius and sacrifice, the spirit and devotion of your race. But have you ever considered that these great buildings of yours, seen from the south, loom up as one of a great chain of well-devised Border fortresses and keeps of learning which, generation after generation, have trained and equipped the Scot for his conquest of the world in almost every detail of the world’s development and administration? Many excuses for these overwhelming facts have been put forward by the overwhelmed. One has heard it argued that a race born among granite boulders and compelled, at an early age, to seek their sustenance from under the snow would naturally find any condition of life elsewhere sub-tropically luxurious. It is true, too, that surroundings which enforce a certain wise thrift do save a man from wasting his soul on barren emotions in spiritual matters, as well as from lending himself to the grosser cruelties of collective sentimentalism.

A stranger, speaking with due deference, might be forgiven for thinking that, though the liberality of your citizens made and adorned your University, none the less, the driving force behind this three-hundred-year-old dominion of the Scot derives in essence from the strict and unbreakable spirit of that great educationist John Knox, who, whatever he may have said about the monstrous regiment of women, neither flattered nor feared any flesh. It was John Knox who, at lifelong hazard, laid down and maintained the canon that it should be lawful for men so to use themselves in matters of religion and conscience as they should answer to their Maker. Is it too much to say that, after all these years, on these triple foundations of freedom, authority, and responsibility, the moral fabric of your University was reared? Nor did it fail when the bitter and grinding dispensation of the Great War overtook us.

Here, as elsewhere, the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children. The sons of your University were constrained, like their forbears, so to use themselves in matters of conscience as they should answer to their Maker. All earth has witnessed that they answered as befitted their ancestry; that they endured as the strong influences about their youth had taught them to endure. They willingly and wittingly left the purpose of their lives unachieved in order that all life should not be wrenched from its purpose; and without fear they turned from these gates of learning to those of the grave. This is their glory and also that of their severe but beloved Mother who, while she gave them learning, dowered them also with that Wisdom lacking which all Learning is folly.

I AM greatly honoured by being allowed to propose the toast of “Prosperity to the Royal Literary Fund”—in other words, to appeal to you on behalf of certain men and women of letters who stand in need of your assistance. And since one speaks of the workmen, one must speak also a little of the craft to which they have given or are giving their lives. I shall be specially careful to guard against making extravagant claims for either. If you go no further back than the Book of Job you will find that letters, like the art of printing, were born perfect. Some professions, law and medicine, for example, are still in a state of evolution, inasmuch as no expert in them seems to be quite sure that he can win a case or cure a cold. On the other hand, the calling of letters carries with it the disabilities from which these professions are free. When an eminent lawyer or physician is once dead, he is always dead. His ghost does not continue to practise in the Law Courts or the operating theatre. Now it cannot have escaped your attention that a writer often does not begin to live till he has been dead for some time. In certain notorious cases the longer he has been dead the more alive he is, and the more acute is his competition against the living. I do not ask you to imagine the feelings of a barrister exposed to the competition of all the dead Lord Chancellors that ever sat on the woolsack, each delivering judgements on any conceivable case at 6d. per judgement, paper-bound. I only ask you to allow that what lawyers call the “dead hand”—in this case with a pen in it—lies heavy on the calling of letters. In other callings of life there exists a convention that what a man has made shall be his own and his children’s after him. With regard to letters, the world decides that, after a very short time, all that a writer may have created shall be taken from him and shall become the property of anybody and everybody except the original maker. This may be right. It may be more important that men should be helped to think than that they should be helped to live. But those on whom this righteousness is executed find it difficult to establish a family on letters. Sometimes they find it difficult to feed one. That letters should be exempted from the law of continuous ownership seems to constitute another handicap to the calling. Most men are bound by oath, or organisation, or natural instinct not to work for nothing. When his demon urges a man of letters to work, he may do so without any regard to wages or the sentiments of his fellow-workers. This may be incontinence or inspiration. Whichever it is, we must face the fact and its consequences, that at any moment a man of letters may choose to pay, not only with his skin, but in cash and credit for leave to do his work, to say the thing he desires to say. This is perhaps not fair to himself or his fellows, but it is a law of his being, and as such constitutes yet another handicap.And there is a legend in Philistia—a pharisaical legend—that those who follow letters are disorderly-minded, unstable of habit, and thus peculiarly open to misfortune. Now, since the Pharisees originate very little that has not been put into their minds by the Scribes, it is possible that men of letters, writing about men of letters, have themselves to thank in some measure for this unkind judgement. Every man in trouble naturally cries that there is no sorrow like his sorrow; but not all men, not all men’s friends, nor all men’s enemies, can draw the world’s attention to that complaint. Writers have been their own interpreters in this respect—not always to their own advantage. It does not square with experience that any class of men has pre-eminence over any other class in the zeal and perseverance with which its members go about to compass their own ruin. Is it not more reasonable to hold that the triple handicap I have mentioned, and not so much individual folly, is responsible for the high percentage of casualties among men of letters. Men perpetually measured against the great works of the past; men debarred by law from full possession of their own works in the present; men driven from within to work whether their world desires that work or not—such men must always enjoy the privilege accorded to minorities. They must suffer. Much of this suffering is inevitable, but some of it the Fund, by your good help, can reach and alleviate as few other institutions can. It has had over a century’s experience of all the chances and misfortunes that can overtake men and women. Its work is done, as we would desire it to be done in our own cases, in silence and discretion, and for that very reason it is difficult, as the report says, to bring home the value of the work to the public.

We cannot foretell in the multitude of words about us whose words are destined to survive, to rule, to delight, to persuade or accuse those that come after. We hope that some will so survive. All we are sure of now is that among the many men and women who have followed letters in this high hope a certain number have been overborne by evil chances, accidents, and misfortunes, which but for the mere whim of time and fortune, might have come to any one of us.

I give you, then, that you may give, “Prosperity to the Royal Literary Fund”.

I THINK this is an occasion on which it behoves us all to walk rather circumspectly. If you will let me, I will try and tell you why. About sixteen hundred years ago, when Rome was mistress of the world and the Picts and the Scots lived on the other side of the Wall that ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, the story goes that Rome allowed all those peoples one night in the year in which they could say aloud exactly what they thought of Rome, without fear of the consequences. So then, on that one night of the year, they would creep out of the heather in droves and light their little wandering fires and criticise their Libyan Generals and their Roman Pontiffs and the Eastern camp followers, who looked down on them from the top of the great high unbreakable Roman Wall sixteen hundred years ago.To-day, Imperial Rome is dead. The Wall is down and the Picts and the Scots are on this side of it, but thanks to our Royal Society of St. George, there still remains one night in the year when the English can creep out of their hiding-places and whisper to each other exactly what we think about ourselves. No, it is not quite safe to criticise our masters—our masters who tax us and educate us, and try us, and minister so abundantly to what they instruct us our wants ought to be. Since these masters of ours have not yet quite the old untroubled assurance of power and knowledge that made Rome so tolerant in the days when the Picts and the Scots lived on the other side of the Wall, we will confine ourselves to our own popular and widely recognised defects.

Some of our severest critics, who, of course, are of our own household, have said that there never was such a thing as the English Race—that it is at best the intolerably insolent outcome of ancient invasions and immigrations, freshened with more recent Continental gaol-deliveries. Far be it from me to traverse such statements. I give them on no less authority than that of the late Mr. Daniel Defoe, Liveryman of the City of London, author of Robinson Crusoe and of a pamphlet called The True-born Englishman. He deals very faithfully with the English. So faithfully that, in deference to the susceptibilities of some races, I will not give his version of the Englishman’s pedigree, but in his summing up of the true-born Englishman, Defoe says:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction, A metaphor intended to express A man akin to all the Universe.

In that last line it seems to me that Defoe slips into a blessing where he meant to curse, because a man “akin to all the Universe” cannot be wholly lost. He must have some points of contact with humanity. And the Englishman has had several.

The Phoenicians taught him the rudiments of shopkeeping; the Romans taught him love of sport by hiring him to fight wild beasts in their arenas. Under the Heptarchy he studied Social Reform, which in those unenlightened days consisted of raising levies on capital in order to buy off the Heathen of the North from taking direct action against English industries. He next took a three-hundred-years’ course of colloquial and Law French under eminent Norman teachers. He did not learn that language then or since, but it left him with a profound respect, based on experience, for his neighbours across the Channel, and a conviction, which time has deepened, that they were the only other people in the world who mattered.

For five hundred years his affairs, domestic and foreign, were controlled by French, Italian, Spanish, with occasional Austrian, politico-ecclesiastical authorities, who tried to teach him that “this realm of England” was but part of a vast international organisation destined to embrace, protect, and instruct all mankind. He escaped from those embraces only to find himself subjected to the full rigours of the Puritan Conscience, which at that time was largely directed by gentle men from Geneva, Leyden, Amsterdam, and the Low Countries. While thus engaged he was, under pretext of union, finally and fatally subjugated by the Scot. A few years later he embarked on the swelling tide of party politics in all their attendant purity; since which he has seldom been allowed to look back, and never forward.

I submit that such a nightmare of national experiences would have driven an unmixed race to the edge of lunacy. But the Englishman is like a built-up gun barrel, all one temper though welded of many different materials, and he has strong powers of resistance. Roman, Dane, Norman, Papist, Cromwellian, Stuart, Hollander, Hanoverian, Upper Class, Middle Class, Democracy, each in turn through a thousand years experimented on him and tried to make him to their own liking. He met them each in turn with a large silent toleration, which each in turn mistook for native stupidity. He gave them each in turn a fair trial and, when he had finished with them, an equally fair dismissal. As an additional safeguard he devised for himself a social system in watertight compartments, so arranged that neither the waters of popular emotion nor the fires of private revenge could sweep his ship of State from end to end. If, in spite of this, the domestic situation became too much for him he could always take a ship and go to sea, and there seek or impose the peace which the Papal Legate, or the Mediaeval Trade Union, or a profligate Chancellor of the Exchequer denied to him at home. And thus, gentlemen—not in a fit of absence of mind—was the Empire born. It was the outcome of the relaxations of persecuted specialists—men who for one cause or another were unfit for the rough and tumble of life at home. They did it for change and rest, exactly as we used to take our summer holidays, and, like ourselves, they took their national habits with them. For example, they did not often gather together with harps and rebecks to celebrate their national glories, or to hymn their national heroes. When they did not take them both for granted, they, like ourselves, generally denied the one and did their best to impeach the other. But, by some mysterious rule-of-thumb magic, they did establish and maintain reasonable security and peace among simple folk in very many parts of the world, and that, too, without overmuch murder, robbery, oppression, or torture.

One secret of the success of the English was, perhaps, their imperturbable tolerance. A race that has been persecuted, or—what comes to the same thing—bored, by every persecuted refugee to whom they have ever given an asylum, naturally learns to tolerate anything. Their immensely mixed origin, too, made the English in a very real sense “akin to all the universe”, and sympathetic in their dumb way with remote Gods and strange people. Above all, their long insular experience of imported brain-storms had taught them that men should not try to do better than good for fear lest worse than bad might follow. And there has been enough of worse than bad in the world for the last few years. Our national weakness for keeping to the easiest road to the latest possible minute sooner than inconvenience ourselves or our neighbours has been visited upon us full tale. After ninety-nine years of peace the English were given ninety-six hours in which to choose whether they would buy a little longer peace from the Heathen of the North, as some of their ancestors had done, or whether they would make peace with them as our King Alfred made it with the Danes. It was a race that had almost forgotten how to say “No” to anybody who said “Yes” in a sufficiently loud voice. It seemed as if it had quite forgotten that it had broken a Church, killed a King, closed a Protectorate and exiled another King, sooner than be driven where it did not want to go. But when its hour came, once again it decided to go its own way, and once again by instinct. For it had prepared nothing—it had foreseen nothing. It had been assured that not only was there no need for preparation against war, but that the mere thought of preparation against war was absurd where it was not criminal. Therefore, through the first two years of the war, it was necessary to throw up a barricade of the dead bodies of the nation’s youth behind which the most elementary preparations could be begun.

There has been no such slaughter of the English in English history, but the actual war was no more than a large-scale repetition of previous national experiences. If an Elizabethan Statesman (or adventurer) could have returned to England during the war he would, I think, in a very short time have been able to pick up his office work almost where he dropped it. His reports and his maps would have been a little more detailed, but he would have been surprisingly abreast of the whole situation.

Where the old English influence had struck deep all the world over, he would have seen help and comfort hurried up to all the fronts from all the world over without count or tale, without word or bond to limit or confirm it. Where the old alien influences that he knew so well had persisted, or where the new influences directed by the old were at work, he would have seen, as he would have expected, all help for the war denied, withheld, or doled out grudgingly, piecemeal at a high price. He would have recognised that what held firm in the days of the Armada held firm at Armageddon: that what had broken beneath his hand then was rotten in our hand now. Bar a few minor differences of equipment, he would have felt just like any sailor or soldier returning to some bitterly familiar job of sea-patrol or trench life between ’14 and ’18. Like those men he would have taken for granted a great deal upon which other nations might have wasted valuable thought and attention. Our stories of Coronel and Zeebrugge, of the English county battalions not one year old that died to the last man as a matter of routine on the fronts that they were ordered to hold, would have moved him no more and no less than the little affair of Sir Richard Grenville off Flores, in the Revenge. That troopers of County Yeomanry in Mesopotamia, picked almost at random, could, single-handed and by sheer force of character, control and conciliate in a few days a turbulent Arab village, would have amazed him no more and no less than any tale of Panama, or of our first venture across the world, told him by Sir Francis Drake or any forgotten captain of the same age. Being of the breed he would have known the breed and would have taken the work of the breed for granted.

And herein, as I see it, lies the strength of the English—that they have behind them this continuity of immensely varied race-experience and race-memory, running equally through all classes back to the very dawn of our dawn. This imposes on them unconsciously, even while they deny or deride it, standards of achievement and comparison, hard perhaps, and perhaps a little unsympathetic, but not low—not low—and, as all earth is witness, not easily to be lowered. And that is the reason why in the things nearest our hearts we praise so little and criticise so lavishly. It is the only compliment which an Englishman dare pay to his country.

As you know, our standards of achievement and comparison do not appear on the surface; nor are they much in men’s mouths. When they are, they are mostly translated into terms of sport or the slang of our various games. But whenever the English deal in earnest with each other, or with the outside world, those standards are taken for granted. And it is by the things that we take for granted without word that we live. It was taken for granted during the war that every day was St. George’s Day, on one or other of our seven fronts.

And now, we and our kin, after these great years, are sick, dizzy, and shaken—like all convalescents, a little inclined to pity ourselves, a little inclined to stay as long as possible on a diet of invalid slops, and a little more than inclined to mistake the hysteria of convalescence for the symptoms of returning life and thought. Here also instinct tells us that the weight, the range, and the evenly spread richness of our national past should ballast us sufficiently to navigate through whatever storms—or brain-storms—there may be ahead. And we are threatened with several.

One school of thought, Muscovite in origin, holds, as the Danes held twelve hundred years ago, that rapine and scientific torture will elevate our ideals, which up to the present have merely taught us to try to do our duty to our God and our neighbour. Others are content to work for the organised bankruptcy of whatsoever is of good repute, including the systematic betrayal of our friends, very much on the same lines as some people used to panic after every Crusade and every visitation of the plague. We are further promised an unparalleled outbreak of education, guaranteed to produce a standardised State-aided mind. The Church evolved almost a parallel system in the Middle Ages, which, much to her surprise, produced the Reformation.

Lastly, lest we should ever again lapse into our “pathetic contentment”, the breed which organised at a week’s notice to achieve the impossible and achieved it—by earth, sea, and air achieved it—is now, as a reward, to be ruthlessly reorganised in every detail of its life, walk, and conduct. That great work was begun by William the Conquerer, Anno Domini 1066, and has been before Committee or Commission ever since.

Norman, Papist, Cromwellian, Stuart, Hollander, Hanoverian, Upper Class, Middle Class, Democracy, have each in turn tried their fleeting hand on the “man akin to all the Universe”. From each in turn he has taken what he wanted; to each in turn he has given a fair trial; and, when he has quite finished, an equally fair dismissal.

What will he do in the future?. We are too near to the dust of the main battle to see clearly. We know that England is crippled by the loss and wastage of a whole generation, and that her position, from the civil point of view to-day, is the position of our armies in the darkest days of the war. That is to say, all leave is stopped for any man who can manage to stand up to his job, no matter how sick or stale he may feel himself to be, and there is undreamed-of promotion for untried men who, simply because they are not dead, will now have to face heavier responsibility, longer hours, and criticism that certainly will not grow milder as the years pass. But no miracles have occurred.

This world of ours, which some of us in their zeal to do better than good have helped to create, but which we must all inherit, is not a new world, but the old world grown harder. The wheel has come full circle. The whole weight of the world at the present moment lies again, as it used to lie in the time of our fathers, on the necks of two nations, England and France. The sole force under God’s good Providence that can meet this turn of our fate, is not temperament, not opportunism, nor any effort to do better than good, but character and again character—such mere ingrained, common-sense, hand-hammered, loyal strength of character as one humbly dares to hope that fifteen hundred years of equality of experience have given us.

If this hope be true—and because we know the breed in our hearts we know that it is true—if this hope be justified, our children’s children, looking back through the luminous years to where we here stumble and falter, will say to themselves: “Was it possible—was it possible that the English of that age did not know, could not see, dared not even guess, to what height of strength, wisdom, and enduring honour they had lifted their land?”

But we will be circumspect! My lords, ladies and gentlemen—for what there is of it—for such as it is—and for what it may be worth—will you drink to England and the English?

AS I understand it and as recent events have, I believe, proved, the Royal Geographical Society is the supreme Court of ultimate appeal and final revision throughout the geographical world.To you, Gentlemen, in the long run, come all the survivors of all the expeditions—the men who, like many of you here to-night, have borne the extremes of adventure and hardship, to report what they have done in man’s secular battle against Space and Time. To your tribunal they submit the records of their toil. From your hands that record receives its final stamp of worth.

I confess there is something, to me as terrible as it is touching, in the thought of the men even now scattered under the shadow of death, from the Poles to the deserts, the crown of whose labours, when, please God, they return, will be your judgement. I have had the honour of meeting many such men of many nationalities, explorers of sand-buried cities in Central Asian deserts, bold hunters of big game or of meridians across unexplored mountains. They have told me many tales. But in one tale they never varied. Each took it for granted all he had done availed little till it had been weighed and passed by you—to the end, if I may paraphrase one of the old geographers—to the end that “these men which were the painful and personal travellers might reap that good opinion and just commendation which they had deserved”.

So high stands your credit; so unquestioned is your authority after nearly a hundred years!

And when one thinks a little on the illustrious roll of the living and the dead who have returned from the ends of the earth to speak before your assemblies, one realises that you have preeminently the right to seek from your President all the qualities that mark a leader of men.

If courage, organisation, tenacity, and the habit of commanding achievement are needed in the wilderness where men make their names, they are at least as necessary at headquarters where the work and the names are enrolled. As everyone knows: “Work begins when the work is finished”. And there is yet another saying out of the Bureaucratic East which I am sure His Excellency—I mean your President—knows well. It holds good where anything is being done: “If you give a man more than he can do he will do it. If you only give him what he can do he’ll do nothing”.

It does not lie in my mouth to speak of the continuous, unnoticed, but vitally important work on which an organisation such as yours must be based. In common with thousands of others I have freely availed myself of the information which your Society always stands ready to offer or point the way to. For that reason I am specially glad to know that you are now on the road to house yourselves in a manner more befitting your merits. If the building matched the work, there should arise not only the headquarters of a great Society, but a vast and ample hall—not of lost footsteps, but a Valhalla, as it were, of all the “personal and painful travellers” whose sacrifices have won us the use of the world; a sumptuously equipped Lodge of Instruction where men could find to their hand or see spread out before their eyes the whole history of travel which, after all, is the history of civilisation—where they could consult the sum of recorded science so far as it touches travel.

Maybe this is a dream. We are a race more given to employing the spirit of man in great works than to building temples in his honour. But I believe it will not be all, not always a dream. And when it comes true, the realisation will be due to your President.

It has been his fortune in the past to administer revenues of some size in the interests of a considerable society. If his present work concerns itself with smaller sums and the interests of a body which does not number one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, the power and personality that spent themselves ungrudgingly on the one, have not been and will not be withheld from the other.

For it is no small part of England glory, as it is her strength, that those who serve her do so without limit or reservation equally in all things. So it is natural to us; it is accepted as part of the order of our nature; that your President should bring to your use and devote to your service energies and experience proven in schools that are neither cramped nor unworthy. I need not speak of that side of his life. It will endure.

Of the man himself it can fairly be said what the pious Richard Hakluyt, who was surely in spirit your first President, wrote of himself: “Howbeit, the honour and benefit of this commonwealth wherein I live and breathe hath made all difficulties seem light, all pains and industry pleasant, and all expenses of light value and moment unto me”.

I HAVE been honoured by a request that I should help to dedicate this rifle range to the memory of an old Wykehamist—George Cecil, Ensign of Grenadiers, killed in action. Cecil was not very long before your time, as once time was reckoned, but since each month now equals a year he dates, so far as you are concerned, to the beginning of history. He was one of that original army in France which was sacrificed almost to a man, in order that England might gain time to create those armies which, till then, she had not thought necessary. He was killed just before the long retreat from Mons came to an end—killed leading his platoon in the woods round Villers Cotterets fifteen months ago.He did no more and no less than thousands have done since, and many thousands are preparing themselves to do; for it would be difficult to find a household in England to-day free from the fact or the fear of a similar loss.

Yet in one respect he differed from some of his fellows. He was devoted by instinct to the profession of arms, and had made it his consuming interest and study, not through any child’s delight in its glitter, but because he absolutely believed in the imminence of that very war in which he fell. It was curious in a world full of wise grown men, who would not or could not understand, to listen to his unshaken conviction on this matter; and to watch the extraordinarily thorough way in which he set about fitting himself to meet it. Both at Sandhurst and during his short time in the Service, he toiled, as I know, at the details of his profession with the passion of a boy, and studied the wider aspects of it with the judgement of a man. I remember a couple of years ago the boy, for he was little more then, saying to me across an atlas: “We shall be sent to prolong the French left—here! We shall not have enough men to do it, and we shall be cut up. But with any luck I ought to be in it.” His fortune allowed him to fight with the best for the best. He is among the first of that vast company of young dead who live without change in the hearts of those who love them.

I speak now to such of you as propose to follow him. Being who you are, you realise what your Foundation has taught its scholars from the beginning—that as Freedom is indispensable, so is Liberty impossible, to a gentleman. This is knowledge which will serve you when you go out into a world whose every landmark has been violently removed, and every distinction save one—an aristocracy of blood—emptied of all significance. Thanks to the unwisdom of your forefathers, the rescue of a wrecked civilisation has been laid upon you and those very little senior to you. Were I addressing men of my own age, I should say that this task was a heavy one. But I speak to youth which can accomplish everything, precisely because it accepts no past, obeys no present, and fears no future. For that reason, I do not doubt your future, nor as much of our future as is in your keeping. It is for your generation to make well sure that those who have defied God and man shall learn to walk humbly before both as long as fear can endure.

The making of the new world that will rise out of these present judgements will fall to your generation also—not only to those in the field, but to those who, for any reason, are afraid that they can never take part in the great work. They need have no fear. After the brute issue of the war shall have been decided on the fronts, all men, all capacities, all attainments, will be called upon to the uttermost to establish civilisation. For then the work will begin of reconstructing, not only England and the Empire, but the whole world—on a scale which outruns imagination. Every aspect of life as we have known life hitherto will have disappeared. National boundaries and national sympathies, powers, responsibilities, and habits of thought will have shifted and been transformed. Our neighbours of yesterday will be our blood-brethren of that to-morrow, bound to us, as we throughout the Empire are bound to each other, by the most far-reaching and intimate ties of common loss and common devotion, and labouring side by side to bring order out of the appalling chaos that humanity has drawn upon itself.

Let no one, whatever his physical disabilities, or however meanly he may think of himself, let no one dream for a moment he will not be needed, and urgently needed, in the new order of things. His duty is to prepare himself now. This is harder for him than for the combatant officer, since an officer’s work is continually tested against actual warfare. The men of the second line—the civil reserve that will take over when the sword is sheathed—have no such check, nor have they the officer’s spur of visible responsibility. Their turn comes later. Till it comes they must work on honour, that they may be ready to uphold the honour of civilisation. They have not long to wait. In a few years some of you must be working with our Allies at the administration of what may be left of Central Europe, where you will have to invent new systems to meet new conditions almost as swiftly as, during the war, new weapons were invented to meet new forms of attack. I say in a few years, because the youngest captain I know is twenty-one; the youngest I have heard of is nineteen. And so it will be on the civil side. The war has given the youth of all our world a step in age—additional seniority of three years. You may say—though your relatives are more likely to think it—that your youth has been taken from you. I prefer to put it, that your manhood has been thrust on you early—at the sword’s point. Fit yourself for it then, not according to the measure of your years, but to the measure of our world’s great need.

You have seen and realised the very things which young Cecil felt would befall. As far as his short life allowed he ordered himself so that he might not be overwhelmed by them when they were upon him. He died—as many of you too will die—but he died knowing the issue for which he died. It is well to die for one’s country. But that is not enough. It is also necessary that, so long as he lives, a man should give to his country, as George Cecil gave, a mind and soul neither ignorant nor inadequate.

MONSIEUR LE PRÉSIDENT– In according to me this reception, your Academy confers on me the greatest of honours, and your colleague, Señor Gustav Barroso, has overwhelmed me with praise beyond my deserts. For I am—I have been—no more than a maker of tales and verses which have had the good fortune to interest and amuse. And where men are interested or amused, they pardon many faults; and, as you have done, they reward richly.I count it always as one of the supreme rewards of my work that it has opened to me something of the aims and intentions of my fellow-craftsmen in various parts of the world.

Mes confrères, it is from this point of view that I am acutely interested in your prodigious land. As a man of letters I have reason. As an individual I have also a personal right, at which Señor Barroso has so eloquently hinted. You know the old saying: “Give me the first six years of a man’s life, and I will give you all the rest”. In my case that is true. I was born, and I passed my childhood and my early manhood within the Tropics who is a mother that never forgets her children however far they may travel. So I feel that I am not altogether a stranger at heart to men who have had the breath of the Equator about their cradles, and the sense of vast distances before their young feet.

If I cannot speak your language, that is no reason that I cannot think some of your thoughts. It is possible indeed, that, by virtue of our birthright, you and I may look upon certain aspects of life from angles foreign to men who have been nursed beneath the North Star. It is possible, for the same reason, that you and I may be moved by hopes and apprehensions of which the North is not yet aware—much less informed. For you and I both know the lands and the life where Civilisation must stand on guard against the relentless challenge and defiance of Nature unsubdued that sweeps up to our very gates.

To us, neither sun, moon, earth, water nor the forest are as men see them and deal with them up above, on the shoulders of our planet.

That is on one side of our head—between ourselves. On the other, we affirm our solidarity with the rest of the world—that temperate world which puts on a thick coat when it looks at the stars.

But, whatever stars men may be born under, they are always immensely curious to know and be told how other men live, and what they think of the business of living. Never were they more curious than now, when the experiences of the past fifteen years have delivered upon them the shock, the burden, and the developments of a full century. It is a new world which each nation finds in itself and its neighbours to-day—a world, perhaps, of less reverence and belief, but surely of greater comprehension and larger acceptances than the old.

The wave of destruction that swamped it for so long is being followed by a new tide of creation which one already hears breaking on every shore. Mes confrères, I venture to think that this fresh tide will carry the galleons of Brazil very far.

To you has been granted the richness of an ancient and heroic culture superimposed on the vivid historical background of your Captains and flagbearers—those fierce and arrogant shades of your early conquests—who moved without fear among the mysteries of a land which has not yet revealed a tithe of her mysteries, even to you her sons. Added to this has been a life, intense, isolated, particular, on the one hand, and on the other intimately linked in intellectual, scientific, and economic achievement with the old world. For you, as in the British Empire, there is no extreme of the primitive or the cultured within your borders with which you have not come in contact, or from which you have not drawn contrast and inspiration. But, for you, there is no separation by the seas, of the component parts of your dominions to weaken or to deflect the national influence upon the whole. You have only to contend with oceans of land, seas of mountains and forest; and, in a not distant future, with the peril of limitless wealth poured into your lap by the Nature which you address yourselves more and more to dominate. Yours is a stupendous drama, set in theatres, such as this city and others, of almost unbelievable beauty, and destined to be carried to its triumphant fulfilment with the force, the fervour, and the passion of your own immense skies.

But we who serve the written word, may leave these merely material concerns to the years and the personalities that will give them birth and shape. It is to the tales and the songs—the thousand and one tales and songs—of every aspect and thought of life in this new world of yours that men will turn for the intimate and unconscious self-revelation of your national spirit and outlook upon which, in the end, the understanding, the sympathy, and the admiration of your equals elsewhere will be based. And it is you who are partakers in the world-breath that stirs in all hearts to-day—you who specially share the reawakening of the Latin—who will give to the world these gifts, more precious and more enduring than any other treasure that men can offer to their fellow-men.

In this certainty I salute the Academy of Brazil, part of whose office it is to watch over and to forward these high destinies.

Señor Barroso, you have spoken of the secular friendship between our respective lands. I am a man of short views. I rarely look beyond, two or three hundred years. It is, I think, close upon three hundred years since the father of all our English novelists—Daniel Defoe—first wrote those two magic words—“The Brazils”—which have blazed ever since as beacons of romance and adventure to generations of our youth. It is an equal space of time since our ancestors proved and accepted each other amicably on the high seas, and shared many desperate enterprises over the face of the earth. It is but a few years ago that Santos Dumont gave his life to prove that the air, as well as the sea, can bring us nearer. I argue, therefore, that, two hundred years hence, when the Rio – London mail arrives in forty-eight hours instead of fifteen days, we shall be found continuing untroubled in our ancient fruitful amity, and linked, it may be, by interests more extended and significant than those of the present day.

And I am perfectly sure that, three hundred years hence, Carnival in Rio, of which we are all, this evening, the exhausted survivors, will, like our national friendship, have lost nothing of its vigour. I count it part of my good fortune that I have witnessed the phenomenon of an entire populace rejoicing in the strength and gaiety of life, and yet self-attuned to an exquisite courtesy and good-will.

And what can I say of the good-will shown to me on my too short visit to the threshold of your country, except that it has been as lavish as the beauty of land and sea and life that surrounds us. You have told me, Señor Barroso, that I should find myself among friends. That was true from the first hour—the first moments—of my arrival. And it is because of the grace, the open heart, and—may I say?—the almost affectionate cordiality of your welcome that I have spoken to you as a man speaks only in the house of his friends.