Archives: Tales

WE are told that time softens the sense of loss. That may be possible, but I am sure that, as the actual memories of the War itself recede into the background of the years, we in England have come more and more to realise the patience, endurance, and good-will of that great Ally with whom we entered into the War, and with whom, under your final direction, Maréchal, we ended it. Patience, endurance, and good-will are not spectacular virtues, but they underlie the foundations of honour, respect, and enduring affection between nations as between individuals. It is in this atmosphere of trusted honour, unity, and confidence that we have this day unveiled on your soil our memorial to the Armies of India, who, like your own incomparable legions from the south and east of your Empire, followed our united standards into the War. Like your Armies, also, they were of a great simplicity and an utter loyalty—soldiers for whom there was no darker sin than that of being false to the salt of their obligation.Our Secretary of State for India has touched on the material difficulties and bewilderments that met them in their adventure to the West. Have you ever thought what they endured on the spiritual side when they voyaged forth over oceans whose existence they had never conceived, into lands which lay beyond the extremest limits of their imagination, into countries which, for aught they knew, were populated by devils and monsters? Columbus and his men, seeking new worlds, did not confront half the dread possibilities which these men of India prepared themselves to meet. And in that mood they came to France, and presently wrote letters home to their relatives and their friends trying to make clear to them the spirit of this new universe. Some of these letters I have read. I can testify it was not long before the essential humanity, honesty, good-will, and the sane thrift of France as an agricultural nation soothed their hearts and set their minds at rest.

One young man, whose letter I can quote almost textually, wrote, to reassure his mother, in these words: “Oh, my mother, do not be afraid. These people are as civilised as ourselves, and, above all, the women are as good agriculturists as the men. I have seen it. Their land passes from father to son on payment of the necessary taxes, precisely as it does with us. They buy and sell in the streets, too—portions of fowl and meat, with needles, thread, scissors, and matches, just as we do in our bazaars at home. Have, then, no more fear, for they are in all respects like ourselves.”

That was but one soul among many of all races, castes, and religions whom the gracious spirit and reason of your country had conquered and put at ease. I wish that, in these few words, I could give you any idea of the extent and permanence of your conquest in India.

But these men have done their duty and passed on. There remains behind them the memorial to their dead, concerning which you, Maréchal, so eloquently spoke this morning.

That witness to their honour and, fidelity we confide to France—to the age-old Power with whom, for a thousand years, we have been associated in the development and charge of the world’s civilisation—which, together, we now guard!

PRINCIPAL PETERSON; most-learned fellow-Doctors; and You, discreet and well-conducted Students of our University: According to the ancient and laudable custom of the schools, I, as one of your wandering scholars returned, have been instructed to speak to you. The only penalty youth must pay for its enviable privilege is that of listening to people known, alas, to be older and alleged to be wiser. On such occasions youth feigns an air of polite interest and reverence, while age tries to look virtuous. Which pretences sit uneasily upon both of them.On such occasions very little truth is spoken. I will try not to depart from the convention. I will not tell you how the sins of youth are due very largely to its virtues; how its arrogance is most often the result of its innate shyness; how its brutality is the outcome of its natural virginity of spirit. These things are true, but your preceptors might object to such texts without the proper notes and emendations. But I can try to speak to you more or less truthfully on certain matters to which you may give the attention and belief proper to your years.

When, to use a detestable phrase, you go out into “the battle of life”, you will be confronted by an organised conspiracy which will try to make you believe that the world is governed by the idea of wealth for wealth’s sake, and that all means which lead to the acquisition of that wealth are, if not laudable, at least expedient. Those of you who have fitly imbibed the spirit of our University—and it was not a materialistic University which trained a scholar to take both the Craven and the Ireland in England—will violently resent that thought; but you will live and eat and move and have your being in a world dominated by that thought. Some of you will probably succumb to the poison of it.

Now, I do not ask you not to be carried away by the first rush of the great game of life. That is expecting you to be more than human, But I do ask you, after the first heat of the game, that you draw breath and watch your fellows for a while. Sooner or later, you will see some man to whom the idea of wealth as mere wealth does not appeal, whom the methods of amassing that wealth do not interest, and who will not accept money if you offer it to him at a certain price.

At first you will be inclined to laugh at this man and to think that he is not “smart” in his ideas. I suggest that you watch him closely, for he will presently demonstrate to you that money dominates everybody except the man who does not want money. You may meet that man on your farm, in your village, or in your legislature. But be sure that, whenever or wherever you meet him, as soon as it comes to a direct issue between you, his little finger will be thicker than your loins. You will go in fear of him: he will not go in fear of you. You will do what he wants: he will not do what you want. You will find that you have no weapon in your armoury with which you can attack him; no argument with which you can appeal to him. Whatever you gain, he will gain more.

I would like you to study that man. I would like you better to be that man, because from the lower point of view it doesn’t pay to be obsessed by the desire of wealth for wealth’s sake. If more wealth be necessary to you, for purposes not your own, use your left hand to acquire it, but keep your right for your proper work in life. If you employ both arms in that game you will be in danger of stooping; in danger, also, of losing your soul. But in spite of everything you may succeed, you may be successful, you may acquire enormous wealth. In which case I warn you that you stand in grave danger of being spoken and written of and pointed out as “a smart man”. And that is one of the most terrible calamities that can overtake a sane, civilised, white man in our Empire to-day.

They say youth is the season of hope, ambition, and uplift—that the last word youth needs is an exhortation to be cheerful. Some of you here know—and I remember—that youth can be a season of great depression, despondencies, doubts, waverings, the worse because they seem to be peculiar to ourselves and incommunicable to our fellows. There is a certain darkness into which the soul of the young man sometimes descends—a horror of desolation, abandonment, and realised worthlessness, which is one of the most real of the hells in which we are compelled to walk.

I know of what I speak. This is due to a variety of causes, the chief of which is the egotism of the human animal itself. But I can tell you for your comfort that the best cure for it is to interest yourself, to lose yourself, in some issue not personal to yourself—in another man’s trouble, or, preferably, another man’s joy. But if the dark hour does not vanish, as sometimes it doesn’t; if the black cloud will not lift, as sometimes it will not; let me tell you again for your comfort that there are many liars in the world, but there are no liars like our own sensations. The despair and horror mean nothing, because there is for you nothing irremediable, nothing ineffaceable, nothing irrevocable in anything you may have said or thought or done. If, for any reason, you cannot believe or have not been taught to believe in the infinite mercy of Heaven which has made us all, and will take care we do not go far astray, at least believe that you are not yet sufficiently important to be taken too seriously by the Powers above us or beneath us. In other words, take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.

I regret that I noticed certain signs of irreverent laughter when I alluded to the word “smartness”. I have no message to deliver, but if I had a message to deliver to a University which I love, to the young men who have the future of their country to mould, I would say with all the force at my command: Do not be “smart”. If I were not a Doctor of this University with a deep interest in its discipline, and if I did not hold the strongest views on that reprehensible form of amusement known as “rushing”, I would say that whenever and wherever you find one of your dear little playmates showing signs of “smartness” in his work, his talk, or his play, take him tenderly by the hand—by both hands, by the back of the neck if necessary—and lovingly, playfully but firmly, lead him to a knowledge of higher and more interesting things.

I MUST begin by asking your forgiveness where I touch on matters of which you know much more than I.I cannot claim to have travelled widely, but I have met many travellers, and I have noticed what they tell the public in print of their experiences is one thing, and what they tell their friends by word of mouth is another. So I would like to try to deal with some of the more intimate and personal aspects of travel. They may be trivial or absurd, but one must remember that in a few years, most of our existing methods of transport, together with the physical and mental emotions that accompany them, will be profoundly changed. The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s—one hundred and sixtyeight hours’—travel; when the word “inaccessible” as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning. I present myself to-night, then, as in some sort a recorder of experiences which are on the eve of being superseded.Many years ago a friend of mine was engaged on a survey in a little-known part of Asia. When he came back, I asked him what he used to think about while he was at work. He told me that, as soon as his party had settled to camp-routine, his mind moved in an uneasy triangle—he traced it in the air as he spoke—between Supplies, possible Sickness, and Mileage. The figure was as real to him as one on a blackboard. It was an isosceles triangle with a narrow base, in the centre of which he felt himself to be walking, between Supplies on the one hand and Sickness on the other, always looking forward to the always retreating point M. When his work was ended, and the survey connected up, the point M, he said, “opened and let him through”. Till then he had felt himself constricted—harnessed up was his word—between these imaginary lines. I remember we discussed the matter at some length, and in our interest to discover why his thoughts had cast themselves into a triangle, we missed, I think, the main point—that the phenomenon did not show itself till the boy had been worked rather hard.

That roused my interest in what one might call the psychology of moving bodies under strain. Most of the men I was brought in contact with, knew something about the strain of travel, and I asked them—as I have asked many men since—how they realised their experiences to themselves. Few things are more doubtful than any man’s, especially any Englishman’s, evidence as to his own feelings; and in the rare cases where one meets a man who can or cares to testify, one finds that a very few days of baths, clean clothes, and mixed society blur the clearness of his record. Travellers, like sea-trout, should be caught fresh-run, with their experiences still sticking to them.

Yet it seemed to me, from what I was told, that a number of the men who work under strain and responsibility, as leaders of expeditions—survey, prospecting, exploration, or scientific—come to evolve a more or less definite image of their work within the limits of which, or with reference to which, they accomplish that work. For the sake of brevity, let us call those images pressure-lines.

I have no knowledge of any other case except the one I have given, of pressure-lines taking the form of a complete mathematical figure. One man who had led a rather trying expedition, told me that his pressure-line showed itself, after a few days’ hard marching, as a diagonally shaded bar or line a little above and a little to the right of his right eyebrow. It was a distinct mental image almost as insistent as a scratch on the glass of one’s spectacles; and he felt himself to be constantly pushing in or shouldering towards it. After a good day’s work the bar was clear and firm in outline. A bad day, with lost loads and delayed transport, broke it up into ragged curdled flecks. He carried the bar with him for the first few mornings after his return to civilisation, exactly as one carried the memory of the school-bell for the first few mornings of one’s holidays.

Many of the pressure-lines, of course, cannot be defined in words. One man has written to me: “I had the picture of my job at the back of my head all the time. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was like, but it was there and it was quite real. I kept it by me, or rather it kept by me, till I had had a week’s sleep between sheets.” And another man told me that his pressure-line appeared to him as an amorphous lump—a cross between a monthly calendar and a porter’s load. That gives an idea of complicated pressure and its attendant horrors. And yet another, who suffered from malaria, compared his pressure-line to that indescribable sensation of swelling and thickening of the hands at the beginning of a bout of fever, which, as you know, is sometimes accompanied by a consciousness of indefinitely protracted parallel ruled lines in the head.

In every case, I noted that the pressure-lines did not show themselves till the man was physically tired out—and a little more. When the pressure of the work was removed and the man was fed again, the lines gradually faded, and could only be recalled by an effort of will.

And I remember, too, when I was a young man, listening to Stanley, who was talking, half to himself, of some work he had done in his early days. He had been under the necessity of covering a certain distance in a certain time, and he ended his monologue with an abrupt fore-reaching movement of his first finger, as though he were pegging down or hooking up something, and he said: “Of course, it was the mileage that worried me!” I often wondered whether that gesture of Stanley’s was characteristic, and what form his pressure-lines took.

Several men have told me that their mental idea of their day’s work, as distinguished from the responsibility of leadership, was a ribbon or tape unrolling behind them or being dropped from their hands as they marched. In one case my informant said that he thought of distance actually covered as a clear white tape; distance to the next haltingplace ran forward along the ground like a misty web or skein. These men were not leaders, but subordinates responsible for making good so many miles per diem. One can see the reason for their linear conception of progress. Expeditions, as a rule, string out in single file, and any movement of the leaders is seldom to a flank, but up and down the line.

Speaking from my own experience of the one march I ever had to make in a hurry, my impression at the time, as well as the memory that stayed with me afterwards, was that of the unrolling ribbon. Luckily I had not to worry about supplies, but my single object was to get myself and my coolies out of a certain district as soon as possible. My mind projected itself along an imaginary straight line—in this instance white against dull green. It would be interesting if any of the Polar men who work against white backgrounds would tell us how the idea of their work presents itself to them while they are engaged in it. I have heard that the dogtrain mail-runners of Alaska and Northern Canada sometimes see their winter-trails as short straight lines strung with beads—that is to say, as a diagram of the taut sleigh-traces with dogs attached.

But I think that most travellers do not cast, or do not recall that they cast, their thoughts into mathematical outlines. They retain more or less accurate pictures of incidents that have impressed them personally. I knew one man who said he could run any road that he had marched over, backward between his eyelids like a cinematograph film before he went to sleep. His companions told me that his diary and written work were quite bad; but that they always took his word for the time and place of any event that had happened on the road. Such a gift as this—and some motorists have the rudiments of it—stands at the top of a scale that ends in those disappointing men who, after months of experience, can communicate no more than a hazy recollection of the places where they got food or water or warmth or shelter. Punch has described this type in the man who said: “Rome—Rome. Wasn’t that the place where I bought the shocking bad cigars?” It is not at all a bad type to travel with, because it generally gives all its attention to its own duties. A man who carries too many pictures in his head is apt to forget vital things like straps and kettle-lids when the loads are being packed. On the other hand, I have been assured by competent authorities that the camp-cook, if white, ought to be of a sentimental and imaginative disposition. It makes him more generous. I seem to have read lately of a cook whose notion of a twelfth course of a dinner to some returned voyagers was ten boxes of sardines made into a pile with bacon and pastry to match. May one take it that he was imaginative?

I have, not exactly a theory, but an idea, that first-class leaders of expeditions, however definite and urgent their conception of their work, either do not visualise too much or keep their powers of visualisation under control. At least, I do not remember to have heard any men who have led men into a tight place and out again, say to me: “I could see exactly what was going to happen when the canoe swamped or the bridge broke”. They usually put it: “When the bridge broke or when the hippo charged, I did so and so, or gave such and such orders”. And there is reason for that, too. An old prospector once warned me: “As long as you’ve only got yourself to think about you can think as much as you damn-well please. When you’ve other folks’ hides to answer for you must quit thinking for your own amusement.” So I should be inclined to say that, however great the strain, responsibility does not encourage detailed imaginative excursuses on the road—or on any road—while the work is in hand. Later, when a man is boiling down his log and notes into book-form, he falls back on his store of mental pictures, but, in the actual stress of travel, the first-class man as distinguished from the very first-class second-class man—and this is an important distinction—does not, or decides not to, visualise.

There is another useful gift of visualisation not necessarily connected with the executive capacity that may be worth noting: for the reason that it must deal with new material in the years to come. I do not assert that it is impossible to hold intelligent conversation without the help of an atlas. But I do say that as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and get the atlas. And when that has been mislaid or hidden, it is interesting to see how far the company can carry on, scribbling and sketching in the fork-and-tablecloth style, without it. One discovers then, that most men keep a rough map in their heads of those parts of the world they habitually patrol, and a more accurate—often a boringly precise one—of the particular corner they have last come out of. Motoring has tremendously increased our powers in this respect; for a man who can read a county can learn to read a country, and so on. Many men, I find, can visualise the Empire on Mercator’s projection enough for conversational purposes; and I have sat at the feet of one or two superior men who seemed to be able to spin the 24-inch globe, with steamer-distances, in their heads as required. Ideally, of course, every average man ought to be able to do this. Myself, I am like the rest. I only see the atlas, and that roughly, as far as I have used it. Everything outside those limits is a cloudy blur; and the atlas that I see in my mind is based on the first atlas—a little cheap blue and yellow one—that I was forced to study. Other men have told me much the same thing about their mental atlases, and they all agree that we visualise our imaginary travels as from sea-level, with specially vivid pictures of certain capes and ports and land-falls. Naturally, so long as we travel by sea, we must embark from a port and look out for land-falls. But the time is not far off when the traveller will know and care just as little whether he is over sea or land as we to-day know and care whether our steamer is over forty-fathom water or the Tuscarora Deep. Then we shall hear the lost ports of New York and Bombay howling like Tarshish and Tyre. Incidentally, too, we shall change all our mental pictures of travel.

The other day I asked half a dozen men at random what picture or diagram the words, “He went down to the Cape”, called up in their minds. Three or four of them who had not been there, said it evolved a mind-picture of what they called the “veld”—probably a cloudy composite photograph from illustrated papers. One said he could see the brownish-red outline of Cape Colony as coloured in his private atlas. But one man, who took the road regularly, answered at once by indicating the long curve of the liner’s southerly descent, as that is laid down in the chart. It was his mental sign-talk or way-signal. Assuming identical experience and temperament, if that man’s grandfather had been asked the same question in the days of the sailing-ship, he would have swung his curve westward to within sight of the Brazil coast, and would have made his southing on the long slant. When that man’s son is asked the same question, he will not describe any curve at all. It will have no more meaning for him than the old coach-road over the downs by Salisbury has for the modern motorist. His way-sign will be one straight line slightly inclined from left to right—from fifty-one nothing North to thirty-three South, and fifteen, whatever it is, East; and his time-conception—that indescribable diagram of time which rises in each man’s mind at the mention of a voyage of known length—will be shrunk to a little block or bead or shadow representing forty-eight or fifty hours. And so it will be with all voyages. At present, most men’s mental shorthand of the run to India is a zigzag of four: London—Gibraltar; Gibraltar—Port Said; Port Said—Aden; Aden—Bombay; of the Australian voyage, a zigzag of three: the line running straight from Aden to the southern continent generally. These will be all straightened out into single lines, each carrying its own vastly shortened time-conception.

But all this, as you will say, is in the air. Let us leave it there, and consider for a while the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller. We shall soon have to exchange them for blasts of petrol and atomised castor-oil. Have you noticed wherever a few travellers gather together, one or the other is sure to say: “Do you remember that smell at such and such a place?” Then he may go on to speak of camel—pure camel—one whiff of which is all Arabia; or of the smell of rotten eggs at Hitt on the Euphrates, where Noah got the pitch for the Ark; or of the flavour of drying fish in Burma. Then the company begin to purr like cats at valerian, and, as the books say, “conversation becomes general”.

I suggest, subject to correction—there are only two elementary smells of universal appeal—the smell of burning fuel and the smell of melting grease. The smell, that is, of what man cooks his food over and what he cooks his food in. Fuel ranges from coal to cowdung—specially cowdung—and coco-nut husk; grease from butter through ghi to palm and coco-nut oil; and these two, either singly or in combination, make the background and furnish the active poison of nearly all the smells which assault and perturb the mind of the wayfaring man returned to civilisation. I rank wood-smoke first, since it calls up more, more intimate and varied memories, over a wider geographical range, to a larger number of individuals, than any other agent that we know. My powers are limited, but I think I would undertake to transport a quarter of a million Englishmen to any point in South Africa, from the Zambezi to Cape Agulhas, with no more elaborate vehicle than a box of matches, a string or two of rifle cordite, a broken-up biscuit-box, some chips of a creosoted railway sleeper, and a handful of dried cowdung, and to land each man in the precise spot he had in his mind. And that is only a small part of the world that wood-smoke controls. A whiff of it can take us back to forgotten marches over unnamed mountains with disreputable companions; to day-long halts beside flooded rivers in the rain; wonderful mornings of youth in brilliantly lighted lands where everything was possible—and generally done; to uneasy wakings under the low desert moon and on top of cruel, hard pebbles; and, above all, to that God’s own hour, all the world over, when the stars have gone out and it is too dark to see clear, and one lies with the fumes of last night’s embers in one’s nostrils—lies and waits for a new horizon to heave itself up against a new dawn. Wood-smoke magic works on everyone according to his experience. I live in a wood-smoke country, and I know how men, otherwise silent, become suddenly and surprisingly eloquent under its influence.

And next to wood-smoke for waking rampant “wanderlust” comes the smell of melting grease—such a smell or bouquet of smells as one may gather outside a London fried-fish shop. It is less sentimental and vague in its appeal than wood-smoke, but it hits harder. Where grease is melting, something is being cooked, and that means a change from tinned food for one night at any rate. It is an opulent, a kaleidoscopic, a semitic smell of immense range and variety of colour. Sometimes it reconstructs big covered bazaars of well-stocked cities with the blue haze hanging in the domes; or it resurrects little Heaven-sent single stalls picked up by the roadside, where one can buy penny bottles of sauce or a paper of badly needed buttons. It implies camels kneeling to unload; belts and straps being loosened; contented camp-followers dodging off to buy supplies—turmeric assafœtida, currystuffs; men washing their hands in sand before dipping them into the greasy pewter platters. And the next gust or surge of it may be pure Central Asia—thick, and choking as butter-lamps before a Tibetan shrine—a Tibetan shrine, with frost in the air, one star on the tip of a mountain, and a brown-cloaked Bhotyali rustling up through dry maize-stalks to sell a chicken. Or it may thin out to a mere echo of an appeal that calls up all the pulse and thrill and clamour of the true tropic night-blazing moonlight, black shadow, the roar of the tree-toads, a touch of Chinese matting, a gust of jasmine or champak, and the languid puff of a warm phosphorescent sea.

To me, as to others, a fried-fish shop can speak multitudinously for all the East from Cairo to Singapore; and I have heard West Coast men say that, when the smell turns bitter, it will sometimes duplicate the smell of their palm-oil chop, and cause them to re-live horrible depressing evenings by the light of kerosene lamps, hung under corrugated iron roofs of factories beside brown rivers that bubble. It does not cover the South Seas, that wonderful fifth quarter of the world, where, I believe, the smell of first appeal is burning coco-nut husk, a heavy loading of coco-nut oil, and a dash of salt coral-reef. But it is no mean magician, as we all know.

And so much for universals. Coming now to smells of particular appeal, what would most vividly remind a Polar explorer of past experiences? I suggest that ether-like smell given off by the flame of a big spirit-lamp when it is flattened out against the heated metal cooking-plate above—an unmixed smell, simple of itself, like Falstaff’s sack. I should put the limits of this appeal roughly as from the Seventies to either pole. From the Seventies to the Sixties runs that belt of unsanctified latitudes which are the stamping-ground of the winds, the wilderness and the fringes of the restless ice, all linked together, in the minds of men who know it, by the desolate smell of the stranded berg as it piles up reeking with ooze gouged off the sea-floors. Melville, of the Jeannette, once told me that it would “send your heart into your boots—if you hadn’t eaten them already”. At the Sixties and down to Labrador, it seems to me we reach kindly timber and a suggestion of meat on the hoof. The smell of stranded ice is mixed with the clear breath of seas that are not always frozen, and the acrid tang of a raw moose-hide being passed back and forth through wood-smoke to cure it—this last as characteristic as the smell of home-made rimpje on a Dutch farm at the other side of the world. A little lower, the appeals thicken and become more complex. I suggest evergreens sweating in the sun; birchwood smoke; the oily bark itself; pinegums, resin and tallow melted together; the cleanswept smell of milky-green snow-water pouring over pebble bars; and not so far in the background, a suspicion, or a camp-shifting certainty, of skunk. Here—say 50°N. and 65°W.—we meet our friend the horse, or rather he pushes his way into the rotten-wood smudge (that is an awakening smell, too) beside us. He keeps us company west through the grass-scented prairie air till we are more conscious of him and his saddlery than any other flavour in the landscape.

There is a heart-searching little motif of five notes—horse; old saddlery; coffee; fried bacon; and tobacco (from cut plug to maize-leaf cigarettes)—that can carry a man down from high dry camps in the Selkirks, or wet ones in Oregon, down and down over red spicy dust and dead white dust, through the scent of sage-brush and sharp peppery euphorbias, down to the torrid goat-scented South where fried beans, incense, and the abominable brassy smell of pulque will pass him on to all the forlorn brood of mangrove, foreshore and yellow-fever stinks, until he leaves his horse on the beach, and the Tropics lift up his heart with the wholesome rasp of sunbaked coral and dried fish.

Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen! I will not go on with the catalogue, though I feel like the commercial traveller in the story, who said: “If you don’t care to look at my samples, d’you mind my having a look at ’em. It’s so long since I’ve seen them.”

It is probable that the future will have no place for these links with past delights and labours—that they will be forgotten like the labours themselves—as we have forgotten the smell of homemade soap or the whistle and rap of the flails on a threshing-floor. Only a little while ago a man wrote me from Northern Canada: “We have broken into a new belt of wheat 40 miles wide—and we have left the horse behind!” Even now one can charge by rail in less than a week through the exquisitely graduated and significant series of smells, that lie like iridescence on an oyster-shell, over the last 2500 miles of South Africa, and one can return with no more than a general impression of sunshine and coal-smoke. And, as people always say in the middle of a revolution: “We are only at the beginning of things”.

Conceive for a moment a generation wholly divorced from all known smells of land and sea-travel—a generation which will climb into and drop down from the utterly odourless upper airs, unprepared in any one of its senses for the flavour, which is the spirit, of the country it descends upon! Everything that we have used till now has allowed us time for a little mental adjustment of horizons—time and contact with the changing earth and waters under us. In the future, there will be neither mental adjustment nor horizons as we have understood them: not any more of the long days that prove and prepare, nor the nights that terrify and make sane again, neither sweat nor suffering, nor the panic knowledge of isolation beyond help—none, so far as we can guess, of the checks that have hitherto conditioned all our travels.

And hitherto our life has only taught us to love what we have suffered for or with. One loves a stray dog after one has had to sit up with him for a night or two. How much more that corner of the Earth to which we have given our very hide and health and reputation!

And it is the same on the human side. Men like a man who has shown himself a pleasant companion through a week’s walking-tour. They worship the man, who over thousands of miles for hundreds of days, through renewed difficulties and efforts, has brought them without friction, arrogance, or dishonour, to the victory proposed, or to the higher glory of unshaken defeat. Anything like a man can bustle hounds after a sinking fox, but it takes something like a man to bring them home with their sterns up after they have lost him, or—seen him run into by another pack! It is one of the mysteries of personality that virtue should go out of certain men to uphold—literally to ennoble—their companions even while their own nerves are like live wire, and their own mouths are full of the taste of fever and fatigue. There is no headmark by which we can recognise such men before they have proved themselves. Their secret is incommunicable. One man, apparently without effort, inspans the human equivalent of “three blind ’uns and a bolter” and makes them do miracles. Another, working hard all the time, scientifically reduces half a dozen picked men to the level of sulky, disloyal schoolboys. And everybody wonders how it happened.

The explanations are as bewildering as the facts. A man was asked some time ago why he invariably followed a well-known man into most uncomfortable situations. He replied: “All the years I have known So-and-so, I’ve never known him to say whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well; but I’ve never known him forget a man who was”. Here is another reply to a similar question about another leader, who was notoriously a little difficult to get nn with. One of his followers wrote: “So-and-so is all you say and more, and he grows worse as he grows older; but he will take the blame of any mistake any man of his makes, and he doesn’t care what lie he tells to save him”. And when I wrote to find out why a man whom I knew preferred not to go out with another man whom I also knew, I got this illuminating diagnosis: “So-and-so is not afraid of anything on earth except the newspapers. So I have a previous engagement.” In the face of these documents, it looks as though self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robust view of moral obligations go far to make a leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted.

But then come the accidents for which no allowance is made—or can be made. A good man, who has held a disorganised crowd together at the expense of his own vitality, may be tried, slowly or suddenly, beyond his limit, till he breaks down, and, as Hakluyt says, is either “ignominiously reported or exceedingly condemned”. There is a limit for every man, an edge beyond which he must not go. But here at home only the doctor, the nurses, and the clergymen see what happens next—not the caravan, not the grinning coolies, and the whole naked landscape—and afterwards all the world!

However, these things, and worse, are part of the rule of the road. They have never hindered men from leading or following. Even in these days a man has but to announce he is going to gamble against death for a few months on totally inadequate cover, and thousands of hitherto honest Englishmen will fawn and intrigue and, if necessary, lie like anyone you choose to think of—in order to be allotted one life-share in the venture.

But what of the future? Into what terms will this world-old, foot-pound energy of travel translate itself under the new conditions? Here is our position. Up to the present we have been forced to move in two dimensions by the help of the Three Beasts of Burden and a few live coals in a pot. Now we perceive that we can move in three dimensions, and the possibilities of our new freedom distract and disturb us in all relations. This is because our minds are still hobbled and knee-haltered by inherited memories of what were held to be immutable facts—distance, height and depth, separation, homesickness, the fear of accident and foul weather. The sea, in spite of our attacks, is still unplumbed, salt, and estranging; a mountain-range means so many days’ delay or détour; so many extra rations, sure changes of heat and cold. The desert and the wilderness have still to be approached by cautious sap and mine—depôt and cache. Where there is no water for 200 miles, we shake our head and limp round it. A little while ago we should have done so, humbly, glad to be excused. Now we step out of our path grudgingly, resentfully, resolute to come back again and take no refusal.

Presently—very presently—we shall come back and convert 200 miles across any part of the Earth into its standardised time equivalent, precisely as we convert 5 miles with infantry in column, 10 with cavalry on the march, 12 in a Cape cart, or 50 in a car—that is to say, into two hours. And whether there be one desert or a dozen mountain-ranges in that 200 miles will not affect our time-table by five minutes.

Month by month the Earth shrinks actually, and, what is more important, in imagination. We know it by the slide and crash of unstable material all around us. For the moment, but only for the moment, the new machines are outstripping mankind. We have cut down enormously—we shall cut down inconceivably—the world-conception of time and space, which is the big flywheel of the world’s progress. What wonder that the great world-engine, which we call Civilisation, should race and heat a little; or that the onlookers who see it take charge should be a little excited, and, therefore, inclined to scold? You could witness precisely the same flurry in any engine-room on the Atlantic this evening, where a liner happens to be pitching her propellers out of water. For the moment the machines are developing more power than has been required for their duties. But just as soon as humanity can get its breath, the machines’ load will be increased and they will settle smoothly to their load and most marvellous output.

Frankly, one is not so much interested in the achievements of the future as in the men of the present who are already scouting and reporting along its fantastic skyline. All, or nearly all, that can be accomplished by the old means has been won and put to general account. The old mechanism is scrapped: the moods and emotions that went with it follow. Only the spirit of man carries on, unaltered and unappeasable. There will arise—they are shaping themselves even now—risks to be met as cruel as any that Hudson or Scott faced; dreams as world-wide as Columbus or Cecil Rhodes dreamed, to be made good or to die for; and decisions to be taken as splendidly terrible as that which Drake clinched by Magellan, or Oates a little farther south. There is no break in the line, no loads are missing; the men of the present have begun the discovery of the New World with the same devoutly careless passion as their predecessors completed the discovery of the Old.

I PRAY your patience and forbearance, Masters and Doctors, if I acknowledge in my own tongue the high honour you have bestowed upon me. But you will observe that I do not ask your permission to do this. That is because at the free University of Strasbourg there is now no tongue forbidden to any man within the confraternity of civilised nations. In this you have returned to the custom, momentarily interrupted, of your long and illustrious past. The price paid for this resumption was not small; but it is one in which all the civilised world has shared.

Upon you of this University has been imposed additionally the burden of an oppression, willed and designed in the past, of which the object was, first to enslave, that later it might brutalise, the most sacred springs and sources of man’s intellect. It was a burden of peculiar atrocity, since its external manifestations were camouflaged beneath the apparatus and the verbiage of an elaborated civilisation. All that was lacking to the perfection of its perversion was any understanding of men’s minds—any comprehension of man’s soul. Therefore, the intolerable thing perished, after a time, short, indeed, as the lives of nations are reckoned, but which, to those who suffered and whose sons suffered under it, was a veritable eternity.

That night has passed, but the memory of it remains in your mind; as the knowledge of it remains in the minds of all men who are concerned that, henceforward, communication between man and fellow-man shall be open, direct and uncoerced.

It is that knowledge which makes doubly precious the gifts you chose to bestow, since one receives them, as I do mine to-night, not merely from an ancient and world-renowned citadel of learning, but directly from the hands of those men who suffered and endured in its defence.

YOU have referred with great indulgence to an author of my name. An hour ago I admit I was that author; but, thanks to the high honour which you have done me, I am now a Stationer, duly entered and obligated.This is a heavy responsibility; for one cannot deny that the world might have been happier if stationery had never been invented. Yet it must have been a brother of our mystery—an original Hieratic Stationer—who first discovered that if you soak the leaves of the papyrus plant in the muddy waters of the Nile, and beat upon them with a mallet, the beastly stuff sticks together and makes what looks like paper. So we called it paper, and we supplied it as stationery, and men began to write upon it with reed pens. And when, in the course of time, we had rooted every green thing out of the Valley of the Nile; when we had killed the fatted calf, and the unfatted calf, and the calf unborn to make vellum; we tore the very rags off the backs of beggars, and we ground them and we pulped them to make more and more stationery. Why did we do that? Because some desperate soul, impatient of the slow, beautiful handicrafts of the past, had invented an apparatus called the printing-press. But, a printing-press without paper being as innocuous as an unloaded gun, we instantly charged it with stationery—the magnificent paper of Caxton’s time—and we improved the machine itself; and we devised special inks for it; and we created the business of publishing and distribution; and among us we launched the Eleventh Plague on suffering humanity.

Since that dreadful date there has not been a crime in the Decalogue, from anonymous letterwriting to the spread of idealism, which we have not fostered, facilitated, and democratised. Incidentally, too, we have turned life into the nightmare of a never-empty waste-paper basket.

It is true that our ministrations have prevented, or diverted, authors from reciting their works aloud at street corners. But I hold that, with a little patience, the increase of motor-traffic would have accomplished this end for mankind quite as effectively.

It is true, also, that our existence was forced on us by that providential itch for self-expression which afflicts poets, playwrights, politicians, and—other story-tellers. For, sirs, ye know that by their craft ye have your wealth. Yet it is to our credit that the Stationers’ Company has striven to mitigate some of the evils it has abetted. In ancient days, for instance, at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the Bishop of London, it was our duty not only to black out objectionable passages from the works of objectionable authors, but also to break up the furniture and melt down the types of obnoxious printers. Unluckily the bases of criticism have widened since then; and I am told that I need not look forward to even an honorary share in these righteous delights. For authors, nowadays, may print what, where, and how they choose. And most of them do.

Man is always at war with, or wondering over, himself or his neighbours, or his gods; and he must needs tell all three what he thinks about them. Through the ages the net output of his dreams and imaginings has come to be known as Literature. Nevertheless, many men have given all that they possessed of passion, experience, and art to the making of it. Some have given their integrity also. Their individual names and fortunes concern the world as little as the share of a single coral-insect in building up the Great Barrier Reef of Australia which withstands the tide of the Pacific. But the fabric of the work to which they gave themselves is the one human creation which withstands time. And in no land has there been more wasteful or more superb giving than in England. Their work may at the last be found imperishable, or shown to be mere detritus of ancient thought fashioned and refashioned by the generations as they passed. That has been for the world—not for us—to judge.

Our Records of Stationers’ Hall pronounce no opinion. Impartial as the Recording Angel, they have entered and preserved for our race all the title-deeds of our great inheritance.

I HAVE listened with very mixed emotions to Miss Strachan’s flattering estimate of me and what I have done. There was one moment when it seemed to me that Miss Strachan was disposed, with your assent, to count me as a blessing. In return—it comes from the bottom of my heart—I hope that each and every one of you will find one person in the world before you die who can live with you and count you a blessing. I find myself in an awkward position. But I am consoled by the thought that I am not the only person who has said one thing one day and another the next. My Rectorial Address dealt entirely with the advantage of independence as a possession necessary and desirable in itself. To-day I come before you, equally convinced of the necessity and desirability of interdependence combined with association and union. As is usual in such a dilemma, I defend myself by the time-honoured formula: “I have nothing to add, and nothing to retract”. Circumstances, as the doctor, the pure scientist, and the pure politician tell us, alter cases. The case of the University College of Dundee and the University of St. Andrews is this: The end to which men in both centres are working is towards the most complete association, the strongest sympathy between St. Andrews, with its long history and tradition, and this College worthily designed to meet the needs of to-day and to-morrow, growing up beside St. Andrews to heaped honour and high tradition of her own. The goal is that her sons shall look back with equal pride and affection on College and University alike and, in their day and time there, shall consciously rejoice in them both. I set aside the immediate value to any college of access to University degrees, for, outside of this very real advantage, one can perceive the immense possibilities that the future holds, in equal, intimate, intellectual union and comprehension between this College and the University. Their differences of outlook are, after all, merely complementary. You follow, for the most part, Natural Science and Medicine, which schools as you know, were first opened when Prometheus brought down fire from heaven and Epimetheus burnt his fingers in it. St. Andrews, through time and prescription, had leaned more towards the classics, which, though craftily hidden in the decent obscurity of dead tongues, are in essence somewhat more advanced than all the morning papers. Your professors demonstrate to you scientifically that in matter there is no new thing under the sun. St. Andrews proves the same fact philosophically in the region of the mind. These almost parallel views combined give, as it were, a stereoscopic view of life, showing it in full light and shade, with God’s atmosphere about it, instead of as mere pictures on paper. More and more is our world, fresh from the shadow of death, beginning to understand that it contains matters enough for all minds to explore, wonder, delight in, and to interpret with every gift of reason, daring, and reverence that they may possess. Only, since a man’s work, to be any use, takes the whole of him, men are subdued to what they work in, and become impatient of or uninterested in the effort and idea of others in other fields. That is why all we shoemakers think that there is nothing like leather—and leave our lasts to say so! But there has always been a middle way between the attitude of Swammerdam, half-crazed at the sight of the marvels his microscope showed him in a drop of water, shutting his notebook and vowing such revelations were not to be communicated to mankind; and of that other extreme of mind which rationalises over phenomena inexplicable, and because it has given them names would deliver judgement on the secret springs of life, death, and motive in men.

Some seats of learning say that they are developing in their sons the spirit that shall take full count and advantage of high faith and cold reason alike. Of that I cannot judge. But of this I am sure—that you hold under your hand unequalled chances for begetting such a spirit in the combined life, thought, and work of the College and the University. For you are stationed here in the heart of a vigorous and many-minded people—in a city opulent, energetic, experienced in the application of means to practical ends, and touching, through a myriad interests and dealings, the ends of all the earth. This is a keen and tense atmosphere rightly reflected in the life of your College. On the other hand, you have within artillery range the ancient University less touched than you by these surroundings or considerations, less impelled than you to the forefront of material strife and inquiry, but maintaining always her secular reserve of accumulated wisdom, which modulates knowledge, and that detachment of view which directs, but does not destroy, human sympathies with all aspects of life. Dundee and St. Andrews are necessary, and, in the present posture of the world’s dislocated thought and action, vitally necessary, to each other. There seems to me, then, an ideal marriage; but, like most marriages, it depends for much of its happiness upon material considerations. Gentlemen of Dundee, makers of the city’s fortune, merchant-princes—they tell me that the bride here is ill-dowered. Is it because she has grown up unnoticed, among you so long that she has to take the world with no full sufficiency of gear to be proud of? The standard of living has risen? The more reason, then, that the standard of thought should rise with it. From what I have seen and felt of the life of the Students’ Union at St. Andrews, it has occurred to me that your city might fitly give to her children here their own lodge of the young men, their own temple of youth, where young men associated together even for childish things, may realise what manner of corporate spirit they serve now, and to what compelling idea they are under obligation in the future. It is not easy to make these things plain in the crowded life and ways of a vast city to busy students coming and going to their homes at the day’s end. But give them their own dining halls and gathering grounds, and that divine spirit of youth, which seeks only an outlet, will create all the rest—lightly, unconsciously, but enduringly.

You and I have seen many men ruined by mere money thrown at them without thought. But independent men who have elected to be bound to hard work till their life’s end take little harm from being given the best equipment, the best thought-out set of working-tools that can fit them for their callings. There is room for such equipment, whether it be instruments, laboratories, halls, or new wings to existing buildings; and since a gift is of no avail unless the giver comes with it, there is room for interest, pride, and care. I agree with you that the present moment, when the key-industry of Great Britain is tax-gathering, is not best chosen for an appeal. You will observe, therefore, that I make no appeal. I merely suggest to you opportunity to advance the honour and interest of your University College. It may also be that the name and line of some of you must now die out for lack of succession. Seeing what great things the dead have done, you may desire to keep that name alive among young men in memory of some son of yours who should have borne it. If so, your road is open.

But it is to the living that we must look, and, though much has been taken away, yet to us who have still the light of the sun and the darkness of earth to deal with, much has been given. And as surely as Science is real and Faith is true, so surely much is required of us.

THE SOLE revenge that maturity can take upon youth for the sin of being young is to preach at it. When I was young I sat and suffered under that dispensation. Now that I am older I propose, if you, my constituents, will permit me, to hand on the sacred torch of boredom.

In the First Volume, then, of the Pickering Edition of the works of the late Robert Burns, on the 171st page, you will find this stanza:

To catch Dame Fortune’s golden smile Assiduous wait upon her, And gather gold by every wile That’s justified by honour— Not for to hide it in a hedge Nor for the train attendant, But for the glorious privilege Of being independent.

At first sight it may seem superfluous to speak of thrift and independence to men of your race, and in a University that produced Duncan of Ruthwell and Chalmers. I admit it. No man carries coals to Newcastle—to sell. But if he wishes to discuss coal in the abstract, as the Deacon of Dumfries discussed love, he will find Newcastle knows something about it. And so, too, with you here. May I take it that you, for the most part, come, as I did, from households conversant with a certain strictness—let us call it a decent and wary economy—in domestic matters, which has taught us to look at both sides of the family shilling—that we belong to stock where present sacrifice for future ends (our own education may have been among them) was accepted, in principle and practice, as part of life? I ask this because talking to people who for any cause have been denied these experiences is like trying to tell a neutral of our life between 1914 and 1918.

Independence means, “Let every herring hang by its own head”. It signifies the blessed state of hanging on to as few persons and things as possible, and it leads up to the singular privilege of a man owning himself. The desire for independence has been, up to the present, an ineradicable human instinct, antedating even the social instinct. Let us trace it back to its beginning, so that we may not be surprised at our own virtue to-day.

Science tells us that man did not begin life on the ground, but lived first among treetops—a platform which does not offer much room for large or democratic assemblies. Here he had to keep his individual balance on the branches, under penalty of death or disablement if he lost it, and here, when his few wants were satisfied, he had time to realise slowly that he was not altogether like the beasts, but a person apart, and, therefore, lonely. Not till he abandoned his family tree and associated himself with his fellows on the flat, for predatory or homicidal purposes, did he sacrifice his personal independence of action or cut into his large leisure of brooding abstraction necessary for the discovery of his relations to his world. This is the period in our Reverend Ancestor’s progress through Time that strikes me as immensely the most interesting and important.

No one knows how long it took to divide the human line of ascent from that of the larger apes; but during that cleavage there may have been an epoch when Man lay under the affliction of something very like human thought before he could have reached the relief of speech. It is, indeed, conceivable that in that long inarticulate agony he may have traversed—dumb—the full round of personal experience and emotion. And when, at last, speech was born, what was the first practical use Man made of it? Remember, he was, by that time, past-master in all arts of camouflage known to the beasts. He could hide near a waterhole and catch them as they came down to drink—which is the germ of war. He could attract them by imitating their cries of distress or love—which is the genesis of most of the arts. He could double back on his tracks and thus circumvent an acquaintance of his own kind who was stalking him—which is obviously the origin of most of our social amenities. In short, he could act any kind of lie then extant. I submit, therefore, that the first use Man made of his new power of expression was to tell a lie—a frigid and calculated lie.

Imagine the wonder and delight of the First Liar in the World when he found that the first lie overwhelmingly outdid every effort of his old mud-and-grass camouflages and with no expenditure of energy! Conceive his pride, his awestricken admiration of himself, when he saw that, by mere word of mouth, he could send his simpler companions shinning up trees in search of fruit that he knew was not there; and when they descended, empty and angry, he could persuade them that they, and not he, were in fault, and could dispatch them hopefully up another tree. Can you blame the Creature for thinking himself a god? The only thing that kept him within bounds must have been the discovery that this miracle-working was not confined to himself.

Unfortunately—most unfortunately—we have no record of the meeting of the World’s First Liar with the World’s Second Liar, but from what we know of their descendants to-day, they were probably of opposite sexes, married at once, and begat a numerous progeny. For there is no doubt that Mankind suffered much and early from this same vice of lying. One sees that in the enormous value attached by the most primitive civilisations to the practice of telling the Truth; and the extravagant praise awarded—mostly after death—to individuals notorious for the practice. Now the amount of Truth open to Mankind has always been limited. Substantially, it comes to no more than the axiom quoted by the Fool in “Twelfth Night”, on the authority of the witty Hermit of Prague: “That that is, is”. Conversely, “That that is not, isn’t”. But it is just this Truth that Man most bitterly resents being brought to his notice. He will do, suffer, and permit anything rather than acknowledge it. He desires that the waters which he has digged and canalised should run up hill by themselves when it suits him. He desires that the numerals which he has himself counted on his fingers and christened “two and two” should make three and five according to his varying needs or moods. Why does he want this? Because subconsciously, he still scales himself against his age-old companions, the beasts, who can only act lies. Man knows that, at any moment, he can tell a lie, that, for a while, will delay or divert the workings of cause and effect. Being an animal who is still learning to reason, he does not yet understand why, with a little more, or a little louder, lying, he should not be able permanently to break the chain of that law of cause and effect—the justice without the mercy—which he hates, and to have everything both ways in every relation of his life. In other words, we want to be independent of facts; and the younger we are the more intolerant we are of those who tell us that this is impossible.

When I wished to claim my independence and to express myself according to the latest lights of my age (for there were lights even then), it was disheartening to be told that I could not expect to be clothed, fed, taught, amused, and comforted—not to say preached at—by others, and at the same time to practise towards them a savage and thorny independence. I imagine that you, perhaps, may have assisted at domestic conferences on these lines; but I maintain that we are not the unthinking asses that our elders called us. Our self-expression may have been a trifle crude, but the instinct that prompted it was that primal instinct of independence which antedates the social one and makes the young at times a little difficult. It comes down from the dumb and dreadful epoch when all that Man knew was that he was himself, and not another, and therefore the loneliest of created beings; and you know that there is no loneliness to equal the loneliness of youth at war with its surroundings in a world that does not care. I can give you no great comfort in your war, but if you will allow me, I will give you a scientific parallel that may bear on the situation.

Not once upon a time, but at many different times in different places and ages, it came over some one Primitive Man that he desired above everything to escape for a while from the sight and sound and the smell of his Tribe. It may have been an excellent Tribe, or it may have been an abominable one, but whichever it was he had had enough of it for a time. Knowing no more than the psychology of his age (whereas we, of course, know the psychology of all the ages), he referred his impulse to the direct orders, guidance, or leading of his Totem, his Guardian Spirit, his Disembodied Ancestor, or other Private God, who had appeared to him in a dream and inspired his action. Herein, our ancestor was as logical as a man taking his degree on the eve of a professional career—not to say as a practical Scot. He accepted Spirits and manifestations of all kinds as part of his highly organised life, which had its roots in the immemorial past; but, outside that, the amount of truth open to him was limited. He only knew that if he did not provide himself with rations in advance for his proposed excursion away from the Tribe, he would surely starve.

Consequently, he took some pains, and practised a certain amount of self-denial, to get and prepare these rations. He may have wished to go forth on some utterly useless diversion, such as hacking down a tree or piling up stones, but whatever his object was, he intended to undertake it without the advice, interference, or even the privity of his Tribe. He might appreciate the dear creatures much better on his return. He might hatch out wonderful schemes for their advantage during his absence. But that would be a side-issue. The power that possessed him was a desire to own himself for a while, even as his ancestors, whose spirits had, he believed, laid this upon him, had owned themselves before the Tribal idea had been evolved. Morally his action was unassailable; his personal God had dictated it. Materially, his justification for his departure from the normal was the greasy, inconspicuous packet of iron rations on his shoulder, the trouble he had taken to get them, and the extent to which he was prepared not to break into them except as a last resort. For without that material, backed by those purposes, his visions of his Totem, Spirit, or God would have melted back into the ruck of unstable, unfulfilled dreams, and his own weariness of his Tribe would have returned upon himself in barrenness of mind and bitterness of soul. Because, if a man has not his rations in advance, for any excursion of any kind that he proposes to himself, he must stay with his Tribe. He may swear at it aloud or under his breath. He may tell himself and his friends what splendid things he would do were he his own master, but as his Tribe goes, so must he go—for his belly’s sake. When and as it lies, so must he lie. Its people must be his people and its God must be his God. Some men may accept this dispensation; some may question it. It is to the latter that I would speak.

Remember always that, except for the appliances we make, the rates at which we move ourselves and our possessions through space, and the words which we use, nothing in life changes. The utmost any generation can do is to rebaptize each spiritual or emotional rebirth in its own tongue. Then it goes to its grave hot and bothered, because no new birth has been vouchsafed for its salvation, or even its relief. And your generation succeeds to an unpromising and dishevelled heritage. In addition to your own sins, which will be numerous but quite normal, you have to carry the extra handicap of the sins of your fathers. This, it is possible that many of you have already made clear to your immediate circle. But the point you probably omitted (as our generation did when we used to deliver our magnificent, unpublished orations De Juventute) is, that no shortcomings on the part of others can save us from the consequences of our own shortcomings.

It is also true that you were brought into this world without being consulted. But even this disability, from which, by the way, Adam suffered, though it may justify our adopting a critical attitude towards First Causes, will not, in the long run, nourish our physical or mental needs. There seems to be an unscientific objection on the part of First Cause against being inquired of. For you who follow on the heels of the Great War are affected, as you are bound to be, by a demoralisation not unlike that which overtakes a household where there has been long and severe illness followed by a relaxation of domestic ritual and accompanied by loud self-pity and large recrimination. Nor is this all your load. The past few years have so immensely quickened and emphasised all means of communication, visible and invisible, in every direction, that our world—which is only another name for the Tribe—is not merely “too much with us”, but moves, shouts, and moralises about our path and our bed through every hour of our days and nights. Even a normal world might become confusing on these terms, and ours is far from being normal. One-sixth of its area has passed bodily out of civilisation; and much of the remainder appears to be divided, with no consciousness of sin, between an earnest intention to make Earth Hell as soon as possible, and an equally earnest intention, with no consciousness of presumption, to make it Heaven on or before the same date. But you will have ample opportunities of observing this for yourselves.

The broad and immediate result—partly through a recent necessity for thinking and acting in large masses, partly through the instinct of mankind to draw together and cry out when calamity hits them, and very largely through the quickening of communications—is that the power of the Tribe over the individual has become more extended, particular, pontifical, and, using the word in both senses, impertinent, than it has been for many generations. Some men accept this omnipresence of crowds; some may resent it. It is to the latter that I am speaking.

The independence that was a “glorious privilege” in Robert Burns’s day is now more difficult to achieve than when one had merely to overcome a few material obstacles and the rest followed almost automatically. Nowadays, to own oneself in any decent measure, one has to run counter to a gospel, and to fight against its atmosphere; and an atmosphere, so long as it can be kept up, is rather cloying. Even so, there is no need for the individual who intends to own himself to be too pessimistic. Let us, as our forefathers used, count our blessings. You, my constituents, enjoy three special ones. First, thanks to the continuity of self-denial on the part of your own forbears, the bulk of you will enter professions and callings in which you will be free men—free to be paid what your work is worth in the open market, irrespective of your alleged merits or your needs. Free, moreover, to work without physical molestation of yourself or your family as long and as closely as you please; free to exploit your own powers and your own health to the uttermost for your own ends.

Your second blessing is that you carry in your land’s history and in your hearts the strongest instinct of inherited continuity, which expresses itself in your passionate interest in your own folk, your own race, and all its values. History shows that, from remote ages, the Scots would descend from their heather and associate together on the flat for predatory purposes, which now take the form of raiding the world in all departments of life—and governments. But at intervals your race, more than others, feels the necessity for owning itself. Therefore, it returns in groups to its heather, where, under camouflage of “games” and “gatherings”, it fortifies itself with the rites, passwords, raiment, dances, food, and drink of its ancestors and reinitiates itself into its primal individualism. These ceremonies, as the Southern races know to their cost, give its members fresh strength for renewed forays.

And that same strength is your third and chief blessing. I have already touched on the privilege of being broken by birth, custom, precept, and example to “doing without things”. There is where the sons of the small houses, who have borne the yoke in their youth, hold a cumulative advantage over those who have been accustomed to life with broad margins. Such men can, and do, accommodate themselves to straitened circumstances at a pinch and for an object; but they are as aware of their efforts afterward as an untrained man is aware of his muscles on the second morning of a walking-tour; and when they have won through what they consider hardship they are apt to waste good time and place by subconsciously approving, or even remembering, their own efforts. On the other hand, the man who has been used to shaving, let us say, in cold water at seven o’clock the year round, takes what one may call the minor damnabilities of life in his stride without either making a song about them or writing home about them. And that is the chief reason why the untrained man always has to pay more for the privilege of owning himself than the man trained to the little things. It is the little things, in microbes or morale, that make us, as it is the little things that break us.

Also, men in any walk of life who have been taught not to waste or muddle material under their hand are less given to muddle or mishandle moral, intellectual, and emotional issues than men whose wastage has never been checked, or who look to have their wastage made good by others. The proof is plain. Among the generations that have preceded you at this University were men of your own blood—many, and many—who did their work on the traditional sack of peasemeal or oatmeal behind the door—weighed out and measured with their own hands against the cravings of their natural appetites. These were men who intended to own themselves, in obedience to some dream, teaching, or word which had come to them. They knew that it would be a hard and long task, so they set about it with their own iron rations on their own backs: and they walked along the sands here to pick up driftwood to keep the fire going in their lodgings.

Now what, in this world or the next, can the world, or any Tribe in it, do with or to people of this temper? Bribe them by good dinners to take larger views on life? They would probably see their hosts under the table first and argue their heads off afterward. Offer ’em money to shed a conviction or two? A man doesn’t lightly sell what he has paid for with his hide. Stampede them or coax them or threaten them into countenancing the issue of false weights and measures? It is a little hard to liberalise persons who have done their own weighing and measuring with broken teacups by the light of tallow candles. No! Those thrifty souls must have been a narrow and an anfractuous breed to handle; but, by their God, in Whose Word they walked, they owned themselves! And their ownership was based upon the truth that if you have not your own rations you must feed out of your Tribe’s hands: with all that that implies.

Should any of you care to own yourselves on these lines your insurances ought to be effected in those first ten years of a young man’s life, when he is neither seen nor heard. This is the period—one mostly spends it in lodgings alone—which corresponds to the time when man in the making began to realise that he was himself and not another. The post-war world which discusses so fluently and frankly the universality and cogency of Sex as the dominant factor of life has adopted a reserved and modest attitude in its handling of the imperious and inevitable details of mere living and working. I will respect that attitude.

The initial payments on the policy of one’s independence, then, must be financed, by no means for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith towards oneself, primarily out of the drinks that one does not too continuously take; the maidens in whom one does not too extravagantly rejoice; the entertainments that one does not too systematically attend or conduct; the transportation one does not too magnificently employ; the bets one does not too generally place, and the objects of beauty and desire that one does not too generously buy. Secondarily, those revenues can be added to by extra work undertaken at hours before or after one’s regular work, when one would infinitely rather rest or play. That involves the question of how far you can drive yourself without breaking down, and if you do break down how soon you can recover and carry on again. This is for you to judge, and to act accordingly.

No one regrets—no one has regretted—more than I that these should be the terms of the policy. It would better suit the spirit of the age if personal independence could be guaranteed for all by some form of co-ordinated action combined with public assistance and so forth. Unfortunately, there are still a few things in this world that a man must manage for himself; his own independence is one of them; and the obscure, repeated shifts and contrivances and abstentions necessary to the manufacture of it are too personal and intimate to expose to the inspection of any Department, however sympathetic.

If you have a temperament that can accommodate itself to cramping your style while you are thus saving, you are lucky. But, any way, you will be more or less uncomfortable until it presently dawns on you that you have put enough by to give you food and housing for, say, one week ahead. It is both sedative and anti-spasmodic—it makes for calm in the individual and forbearance towards the Tribe—to know that you hold even seven days’ potential independence in reserve—and owed to no man. One is led on to stretch that painfully extorted time to one month if possible; and as one sees that this is possible, the possibilities grow. Bit by bit, one builds up and digs oneself into a base whence one can move in any direction, and fall back upon in any need. The need may be merely to sit still and consider, as did our first ancestors, what manner of animal we are; or it may be to cut loose at a minute’s notice from a situation which has become intolerable or unworthy; but, whatever it may be, it is one’s own need, and the opportunity of meeting it has been made by one’s own self.

After all, yourself is the only person you can by no possibility get away from in this life, and, may be, in another. It is worth a little pains and money to do good to him. For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself not to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things that he has promised himself or his friends to do; but he rarely forgets or forgives when he had promised himself not to do even a little thing. This is because man has lived with himself as an individual vastly longer than he has lived with himself under Tribal conditions. Consequently, facts about his noble solitary self and his earliest achievements had time to get well fixed in his memory. He knew he was not altogether one with the beasts. His amazing experiences with his first lie had shown him that he was something of a magician, if not a miracle-worker; and his first impulse towards self-denial for ends not immediately in sight must have been a revelation of himself to himself as stupendous as a belief in a future life, which it was possibly intended to herald. It is only natural, then, that individuals who first practised this apparently insane and purposeless exercise came later to bulk in the legends of their tribe as demigods, who went forth and bearded the gods themselves for gifts—for fire, wisdom, or knowledge of the arts.

But one thing that stands outside exaggeration or belittlement, through all changes in shapes of things and the sounds of words, is the bidding, the guidance that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his steps on that road. The bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that past when man had grown into his present shape, which past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a past immeasurably remoter still, whose creature, not yet man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute’s kill, even if he went hungry for a while. It is not such a far cry from that Creature, howling over his empty stomach in the dark, to the Heir of all the Ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop to see if they will run to a full meal—as some few here have had to do; and the principle is the same—“At any price that I can pay, let me own myself”.

And the price is worth paying if you keep what you have bought. For the eternal question still is whether the profit of any concession that a man makes to his Tribe, against the light that is in him, outweighs or justifies his disregard of that light. A man may apply his independence to what is called worldly advantage, and discover too late that he laboriously has made himself dependent on a mass of external conditions for the maintenance of which he sacrificed himself. So he may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success, and go to his grave a castaway. Some men hold that the risk is worth taking. Others do not. It is to these that I have spoken.

“And make the council of thy heart to stand; for there is none more faithful unto thee than it. For a man’s soul is sometime wont to bring him tidings; more than seven watchmen that sit on high on a watch-tower.”

I AM sure that to-morrow every member of my craft will be grateful, Lord Balfour, that in your many-sided career you have never thought to compete in the ranks of professed workers in fiction.As regards the subject, not the treatment, of Lord Balfour’s speech, I think we may take it, gentlemen, that the evening light is much the same for all men. When the shadows lengthen one contrasts what one had intended to do in the beginning with what one has accomplished. That the experience is universal does not make it any less acid—especially when, as in my case, one has been extravagantly rewarded for having done what one could not have helped doing.

But recognition by one’s equals and betters in one’s own craft is a reward of which a man may be unashamedly proud—as proud as I am of the honour that comes to me to-night from your hands. For I know with whom you have seen fit to brigade me in the ranks of Literature. The fiction that I am worthy of that honour be upon your heads!

Yet, at least, the art that I follow is not an unworthy one. For Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till someone had told a story. So it is the oldest of the arts, the mother of history, biography, philosophy dogmatic (or doubtful, Lord Balfour), and, of course, of politics.

Fiction began when some man invented a story about another man. It developed when another man told tales about a woman. This strenuous epoch begat the first school of destructive criticism, as well as the First Critic, who spent his short but vivid life in trying to explain that a man need not be a hen to judge the merits of an omelette. He died; but the question he raised is still at issue. It was inherited by the earliest writers from their unlettered ancestors, who also bequeathed to them the entire stock of primeval plots and situations—those fifty ultimate comedies and tragedies to which the Gods mercifully limit human action and suffering.

This changeless aggregate of material workers in fiction through the ages have run into fresh moulds, adorned and adapted to suit the facts and the fancies of their own generation. The Elizabethans, for instance, stood on the edge of a new and wonderful world filled with happy possibilities. Their descendants, 350 years later, have been shot into a world as new and as wonderful, but not quite as happy. And in both ages you can see writers raking the dumps of the English language for words that shall range farther, hit harder, and explode over a wider area than the service-pattern words in common use.

This merciless search, trial, and scrapping of material is one with the continuity of life which, we all know, is as a tale that is told, and which writers feel should be well told. All men are interested in the reflection of themselves and their surroundings, whether in the pure heart of a crystal or in a muddy pool; and nearly every writer who supplies a reflection secretly desires a share of immortality for the pains he has been at in holding up the mirror—which also reflects himself. He may win his desire. Quite a dozen writers have achieved immortality in the past 2500 years. From a bookmaker’s—a real bookmaker’s—point of view the odds are not attractive, but Fiction is built on fiction. That is where it differs from the other Arts.

Most of the Arts admit the truth that it is not expedient to tell everyone everything. Fiction recognises no such bar. There is no human emotion or mood which it is forbidden to assault—there is no canon of reserve or pity that need be respected—in fiction. Why should there be? The man, after all, is not telling the truth. He is only writing fiction. While he writes it, his world will extract from it just so much of truth or pleasure as it requires for the moment. In time a little more, or much less, of the residue may be carried forward to the general account, and there, perhaps, diverted to ends of which the writer never dreamed.

Take a well-known instance. A man of overwhelming intellect and power goes scourged through life between the dread of insanity and the wrath of his own soul warring with a brutal age. He exhausts mind, heart, and brain in that battle: he consumes himself, and perishes in utter desolation. Out of all his agony remains one little book, his dreadful testament against his fellow-kind, which to-day serves as a pleasant tale for the young under the title of Gulliver’s Travels. That, and a faint recollection of some baby-talk in some love-letters, is as much as the world has chosen to retain of Jonathan Swift, Master of Irony. Think of it! It is like tuning-down the glare of a volcano to light a child to bed!

The true nature and intention, then, of a writer’s work does not lie within his own knowledge. And we know that the world makes little allowance for any glory of workmanship which a writer spends on material that does not interest. So it would seem that Fiction is one of the few “unsheltered” occupations, in that there is equal victimisation on both sides, and no connection between the writer’s standard of life, his output, or his wages.

Under these conditions has grown up in England a literature lavish in all aspects—lavish with the inveterate unthrift of the English, who are never happy unless they are throwing things away. By virtue of that same weakness, or strength, it overlaps so sumptuously that one could abstract and bestow from the mere wastage of any literary age since Chaucer’s enough of abundance and enjoyment to quicken half a world. Those who study in the treasure-houses of its past know what unregarded perfection of workmanship and what serene independence of design often went to fabricate the least among those treasures. And they know, also, the insolence of the greatest Masters, who were too pressed to wait on perfection in their haste to reveal to us some supreme jewel scarcely cleansed from the matrix. Our English literature, I think, has always been the expression of a race more anxious to deliver what was laid upon it than to measure the means and methods of delivery.

And this immense and profligate range of experience, invention, and passion is our incommunicable inheritance, which is drawn upon at every need, for multitudes who, largely, neither know nor care whence their need is met.

In every age some men gain temporary favour because they happen to have met a temporary need of their age. Yet, as regards their future, they stand on a perfect equality with their fellow-craftsmen. It is not permitted to any generation to know what, or how much, of its effort will be carried forward to the honour and grace of our literature. The utmost a writer can hope is that there may survive of his work a fraction good enough to be drawn upon later, to uphold or to embellish some ancient truth restated, or some old delight reborn.

Admitting this, a man may, by the exercise of a little imagination, persuade himself that he has acquired merit in his lifetime. Or, if imagination be lacking, he may be led to that comfortable conclusion by the magic of his own art heard as we have heard it from Lord Balfour to-night, on, the lips of a man wise in life, and a Master not ignorant of the power of words.

IN thanking you for the warmth and good-will of your welcome to-night, I would point out that this is not even the second time that I have set foot in Alsace. The first was when I visited Thann in the autumn of ’15. But then, for reasons now happily removed, it was difficult for me to advance more than half way up the main street of that beautiful town. The second occasion was when I came through Alsace, for too short a time, in April of this present year, and saw the first crops pushing through in the superbly cultivated fields.

I have been told recently, what I learned long ago from the books of your Erckmann-Chatrian, that it is his devotion to his native soil which he cultivates which gives the Alsatian his historical hardihood and independence of character. That may well be. The soil is the best and wisest of teachers. But we know also that when a people, free by instinct and origin, have been forced to act and suffer for their liberty as Alsace has been forced, their character is developed exactly as the strength and quality of a forest is developed by the very storms that seek to remove it.

Remember what your Jaures says about a certain forest. “You may build a wall through the heart of the forest if you please; but the roots of the trees will touch each other beneath it. The branches of the trees will meet and join overhead. The forest has only one soul.”

Alsace is that Forest, and that Wall, as we know, was built very cleverly and very strongly by a people whose ambition was, and is, to build a wall around all mankind. But the slow, irresistible strength of the trees undermined and upheaved it. The Forest defeated the Wall yet again, and for ever.

It is so with all forests. It is so with all races. Listen a little while I speak to you of my own race, for there are foolish people who would try to build a wall between France and England.

Your attachment to your land is because you have lived in it and suffered for it, as your fathers did before you. Your dead of your old wars are scattered all along its frontiers. They lie in all parts of France, and beyond. Have you forgotten where they lie? Wissembourg, Reichshoffen, Gravelotte, St. Privat? The mere names of their resting-places are to you part of your national, your individual life and history and pride. Come with me now to the west of your great country—to those giant bastions of our war that stretch, one after the other from Calais to Rheims. We English have left there, a larger army than Napoleon led into Russia—four hundred thousand of the bodies of our own sons, beside a multitude of whom no trace remains. They died with your sons. Have we forgotten where they died? Ask any man or woman in any English street or field. They will give you at once the name of some little demolished French village of which, perhaps, even you have never heard. They will tell you the very turn of the road to it, the very hedge beside the orchard where their man fell. They will tell you too of the hundreds of kindly, patient French villages behind the lines where your people were so good to our people, not for a little time, but devotedly and continuously, through all those terrible years when yours and ours suffered and toiled together. And more than that! Every square kilometre, indeed almost every square metre, of that France which we know so well, is to us, nationally and individually, a background lit with every human passion; represents to us some intense and burning focus of effort in the days when the English and French came to know the very fibre of each other’s souls.

Do we forget those experiences of the living—those memories of the dead? They have been burned into us for ever. So, you see, that living and dead, it must always be the same between our peoples. Our roots meet beneath the soil. Our branches join and touch each other overhead. The forest has only one soul.

All we have to do is to guard against the people who would try to build a wall across the heart of our forest. We must look to it that they do not find even the chance to make a preliminary reconnaissance for this work. They are very clever. They are utterly without scruple, since it is vital to their attack upon our civilisation that that wall should be made. And they will try to commence it in the name of Civilisation!

I BELIEVE it is not an offence, under the Use and Custom of the Sea, for shippers to offer a steamer more freight than she can carry: but, if the steamer accepts, and overloads accordingly, it is an offence for which the steamer is responsible. But I never realised what a responsibility this was till I accepted your invitation to speak to the toast that stands in my name to-night.This may be a confession of weakness, but it is a lucky man, not to say ship, that has only one weakness; and among my many weaknesses has been an early, acute, and abiding interest in the Mercantile Marine. I have seen its work. I have watched some of its performances from various craft, including gilt-edged liners, where every effort is made to persuade passengers that they are not at sea, but in a much safer place. I am unworthy of those efforts. For when I embark on such a vessel I know I have only to leave the Tudor grill-room, take the electric lift upstairs, and look out of the window of the more or less Perpendicular library on the top floor, and I shall see that same old grey wolf, the Ocean that harried our forefathers, waiting outside. It is not for me to teach you your business, but believe me, gentlemen, a ship is a ship, and you cannot get away from it.

In the same way this island of ours is a ship, as much as H.M.S. Ascension, with the additional disadvantage of being moored between two Continents, so that we can enjoy the weather, political and otherwise, from both. Furthermore, H.M.S. Great Britain carries a passenger list, including stowaways, of forty-five millions, and, owing to peculiarities of her construction, there are never more than six weeks’ supplies of consumable stores aboard her at one time. The balance must come by ship, and if the shipping does not come, a fortnight would deliver us to panic indescribable, and three months would see us embarked on the gallant adventure of cannibalism. These are the facts which underlie the camouflage of our existence on H.M.S. Great Britain. Naturally, they do not trouble the passengers aboard her, any more than the sight of the sea worries the passengers on your floating palaces.

But once in a while something happens at sea to remind us that a ship can be lost in a few hours. And, on land, we have seen all the Russias—one-sixth of the land-area of the globe—drive under in a few years.

Now, ships are lost for all sorts of reasons, some of which may even appear in the Admiralty Court depositions, but when a nation is lost the underlying cause of the collapse is always that she cannot handle her transport. Everything in life, from marriage to manslaughter, turns on the speed and cost at which men, things, and thoughts can be shifted from one place to another. If you can tie up a nation’s transport you can take her off your books.

We have suffered from one scientific attempt to prove this, which very nearly succeeded. For the moment, however, there is a lull in the wars fought with visible weapons. We are deep now in that world-war which aims to destroy the spirit and will of man in his home and at his work. One sound man whose morale can be gassed and gangrened in time of peace till he condones and helps to create every form of confusion that will ruin himself and his neighbour, is doing his country infinitely more harm than a thousand casualties on the battlefield. It is cheaper to induce your enemy to cut his own throat for what you have persuaded him are lofty motives than to do it for him against his will. And this is the essence of the New Model War—to create ill-will, which is the mother of despair, and through that ill-will to exploit the damnable streak in each of us which leads us to stop our own work and talk about the duties of others. The rest follows by itself.

The aftermath of the war, which still hangs round us like mustard-gas, helps this attack. For if you have driven a densely crowded, highly civilised population through the whole cycle of primitive emotions, they are bound to come out of it shaken to the core of their souls; and in that state they are as open to moral and mental infection as a tired man is to influenza. So we have, now, H.M.S. Great Britain crowded to the rails with passengers—some of them storm-sick, many of them ship-stale—who get in each other’s light at every turn, and spend their time telling each other how the ship ought to be run.

To argue with them is useless. It only sends up their temperatures. Our sane attitude towards each other must be that of good-will—a good-will just a little more persistent, just a little more indefatigable than the ill-will which is being fabricated elsewhere. For if good-will can once more be made normal, with it must return that will to work which is the trade-mark of established health in a people. If the will to work be too long delayed, then, all that our race has made or stands for must pass into the hand of whatever nation first recovers that will.

Our recovery has been held back by the propaganda of ill-will and despair that is meant to wreck all effort at its source. But, do you think the engines of H.M.S. Great Britain can be adapted to burn this kind of fuel? I don’t. Our lives for the past few years may have done for some of us what Government Control of trade in the war did for some big firms—knocked us off taking risks in the open market on small margins. There is no denying that a good many men have ceased to “quote fine”. But the old individual instincts in us are not smothered. At heart we are all gamblers born, and the odds in favour of self-chosen, decontrolled lives are more and more worth taking. For men have grown a little tired of being told off to hate their neighbours by numbers, at the word of command. This reaction may or may not mark a turn of the tide, but, at least, it gives a time of slack-water, during which H.M.S. Great Britain may begin to get under way again and work up to the higher pressures.

And think of the stakes! Think, too, with what an astounding equipment we are now able to play for them. By comparison it was only yesterday that, when a ship was once under the horizon, she passed beyond help or call for, perhaps, half a year. To-day a tramp cannot report a cockroach-leg in a slide-valve without half the North Atlantic coming to her help. Months have been cut down to weeks, and weeks to days in the transport of men and things; and, unless all signs fail, we are on the edge of further unbelievable cuts in time. The transport of thought, which carries with it man’s most intimate associations, has outstripped, not only belief, but the speed of thought itself. Even now, it is an accepted diversion for men and women half across the world to listen to Big Ben strike in London. Before long, any man in any quarter of the Empire will be able to call for and be answered by the voice of his own birthplace at its work or play. Everywhere time and space are coming to heel round us to fetch and carry for our behoof, in the wilderness or the market. And that means that it will be possible for us now, as never before, to fuse our Empire together in thought and understanding as closely as in the interchange of men and things.

And it was the Shipping Industry which, from the first, sought out, found, built up, and bound together the entire fabric of what is now our Empire. This it did at hazard, unsupported, in hope of trade, or led by some dream of new roads across new seas. The Shipping Industry is the mother of the Old Navy as it is the sister of the New; in sober. daily fact, the mainstay of our prosperity and our very lives, and in Law, I believe, “a common carrier.” What burden it bears now, what heavier burden the future may lay upon it, you who inherit its present direction know better than the careless world you serve. We see only that there has never been any malice of wind or weather, or of the King’s many enemies, or of the turn of the markets in a thousand years, that the Shipping Industry has not met and ridden out.

And now H.M.S. Great Britain rides to crossseas. Is it any wonder that we look to you once more to help us build up and bind together, against the new day, those old individual qualities which gave our race its ability to see far and its audacity to “quote fine”?