MISCELLANEOUS

SCOTLAND

ST. ANDREW'S DAY FESTIVAL OF THE ROYAL SCOTTISH CORPORATION

30th November, 1925

It is a great honour for one who is not hundred per cent. a Scot to preside over the anniversary of the Corporation. The Charity goes back even further than 261 years. It goes back to the time when the throne was transferred from Edinburgh to London, and in the wake of that throne began the migration southwards which, in after years, attained such great proportions. It being a Scottish army, the casualties by the way were few, but it is a great tribute to the race that from the beginning they made preparations to deal with those casualties. Attempts were made to succour the fallen, attempts which have gained in force from generation to generation as the need becomes greater, so that, as the years go by, there is hardly a family which has attained prosperity in London whose name may not be found in the annals of the Corporation as having helped to make provision for their less fortunate brothers and sisters. In the face of a patriotism so insistent and so persistent it is not necessary for me this night to beg for this great organisation. You have responded to its call already with your traditional and your national generosity.

Now, I would like, as an Englishman, not without connection with a certain part of Scotland, to offer a few observations on the virtues of the Scot and on the impression that the Scot has made in England; and I think perhaps, speaking as an Englishman, that there is one thing above all others which we owe to you, and one thing in which the Scot has set an example, which we would do well to imitate. There is nothing that fills me with more admiration than the way in which your people for generations have held up that standard of plain living and high thinking—a lesson which to-day a world that would, if it could, be a world of high living and plain thinking, needs more than ever before. Nothing has made Scotland what she is more than the magnificent system of parochial education, which she had years before any other part of the British Isles. The picture of the Scottish student with his sack of oatmeal, leaving his work for part of the year, living and drawing on the frugality and self-sacrifice of father and mother, brother and sister, in the pursuit and attainment of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is an example to the whole world, and what your Scots have to be mindful of is that in this age, when education is tending to become spoon-fed, you do not allow yourselves to lose sight of the ideals of the past generations.

When I think of all the lessons you have to give us, I am always struck by the fact that of Scotsmen, I think, perhaps alone, the English people are in no way either jealous or envious. Whatever be the reason, the English have always taken the Scots to their hearts as blood brothers. I do not think it is difficult to give the reason, and I think the reason may be traced to one man of genius. For a long time after the Union it would seem that the Union itself afforded no stimulus—whatever else it may have done—to Scottish literature. One of your own most famous writers in the last century said that at that time you had "theologic ink and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases to have blotted out the intellect of the country"—and when David Hume and Adam Smith came they were still drawing from France rather than from their own soil. But a few years later, by the grace of God, you threw up two men of genius, Walter Scott and Robert Burns. You had, as no other nation ever has had, a man of yourselves to interpret you to the neighbouring kingdom—that was Walter Scott; for however ardent an admirer of Burns you may be, no one could call Burns an interpreter to Englishmen. Scott did a great deal for your country. There was, of course, patriotism before Scott appeared, but he deepened, enriched and ennobled it in a thousand ways for the Scots themselves. All that honours the ancestry of the Scot and the kindred of the Scot, the virtues and the noble deeds of your ancestors, the heroism of the common people—all that he gave you, and through that many in his generation, and in the generation that came after, have felt more than they had ever felt before that they had a country to live for, an ancestry to live up to. It was a tremendous stimulus.

But the greatest service he rendered was the interpretation of Scotland to England. Take myself as a typical Englishman. By the time I was ten I had read the Tales of a Grandfather, and had read all his poems and half his novels. Since then, I suppose, not a year goes by that I do not read some of them again, and whenever I go to Edinburgh I go down to Castle Street and look at the bay window where he stood and the door where he welcomed Pet Marjorie. He said when he first wrote that he wished to do for Scotland what Maria Edgeworth did for Ireland; but how many people of to-day outside those who love books—which is not the same thing as borrowing from Mudie's—ever read Maria Edgeworth? Had there been a Walter Scott for Ireland there would have been no Boundary Commission sitting to-day, and I should have been able to have devoted my week-end, as I had intended, to preparing a speech worthy of this occasion.

That is not all that Walter Scott did. How impossible it would have seemed to Boswell and Dr. Johnson, when they travelled in the Hebrides, if anyone had told them that within sixty years there would arise a genius who would bring the English King to Edinburgh and put him in a kilt, that a genius would arise under the spell of whose wand the Lowlander would adopt the garb of the robbers of the North. I remember when I was in Scotland this autumn I was asked humorously why I did not wear a kilt when in Scotland. I said the last time my ancestors wore a kilt was at Culloden, and I leave it for the English to wear it when they go to Scotland. If it had not been for Walter Scott you would never have seen the kilt south of the Grampians, and the result is that we English—a prosaic race—cannot look at Scotland or at a Scot except through those glasses tinted with romance and history, those glasses that Walter Scott made us wear; and, while we are looking at you with the vision of the Wizard of the North, wrapped in admiration, you attend strictly to business! When Scott wrote his first novel the "Forty-five" was only sixty years back. It seems long years away from us. The Industrial Revolution, which Scott hardly understood, has almost submerged us.

"The successor of Monkbarns does not exchange ideas with the successor of Edie Ochiltree. He meets his fellow lairds in a London club. Edie Ochiltree has left the bonny burnsides for the city slums; Mrs. Mucklebackit sells her ware to a London fishmonger; and Captain M'Intyre hires his moor to a wealthy American; while Mr. Blattergowl is not the unique minister of a unique parish."

And yet, though there is an element of truth in these things, there remains in you that indestructible love of your own people and your own soil; and, in my view at least, it is largely for this reason that you, in spite of a certain amount of industrialising of your country, have not yet been submerged by industrialism to the extent that a large part of the southern portion of Great Britain has been. So long as you keep your contact with nature, so long as the Highlands are left, so long as your great agricultural country is left, those roots are left in the soil which alone can propagate that plant of tradition which means so much to you, as it does to the countryman in England.

If you ask an Englishman what he thinks of Scotland in contradistinction to what comes in his mind when he thinks of England, we think of the heather and the moors, and we see your northern country as we should see it in June, ablaze with the glory of the broom. Those are the pictures that rise in our minds, and if I were asked what represents the soul of Scotland I could not answer better than by the reply which was given many years ago to a relative of mine in New Zealand by an old Scottish farmer. My relative asked him how long the traditions that your people bring from home last in a new country, and the old settler replied, "The porridge and the heather and the Psalms of David last to the third generation as a sustenance for body and spirit." And may they abide for ever, because—and I speak as an Englishman—were the Scot to pass, with his history, with his tradition, with his character, there would pass at the same time from earth a large part of the heroism and the romance of the world, those intangible qualities which, perhaps more than anything else, make us capable of plain living, high thinking and great deeds.

IRELAND

ST. PATRICK'S DAY BANQUET

17th March, 1926

No man can stand here to-night before an audience like this, occupying the position which I do, without asking himself what has happened that such a gathering, that such a company, is possible in London to-night. I feel, perhaps, it means that the secular struggle is drawing—has drawn—to a close; it means that you recognise too generously the little that I have been able to do with my colleagues to help Ireland over a stile.

Having safely surmounted the stile, two facts stand out before the statesmen of Ireland and the statesmen of England. It is not for me in my position to speak, as Mr. MacVeagh did, with the yearning of the Irish for an Ireland one and indivisible, but I still say this, that the fact that by that recent settlement it was recognised in Ireland that there was a problem in the North has, for the first time, rendered the solution at some time possible, because as the Minister for Justice of the Free State said, it is a problem not perhaps soluble at the present time, but one that possibly only time can solve. To solve any problem the first essential is the recognition of it.

Secondly, Ireland is governed to-day from Merrion Street, not from Dublin Castle or from Whitehall. That, I believe, marks the close, as I said, of a secular conflict; but before we glance at the future, in the few words I have to say to you to-night, I do not think we shall waste our time in dwelling for a few minutes on the paths that we have trodden in the past, and the paths we are treading to-day.

We have been too used through the generations and the centuries to conflict between our peoples and our nations, and we know—now that we can look at these things from afar, I trust—that the root of that conflict went deep down into the characters of the two peoples, and that those characters themselves were moulded by their very different histories. In Ireland you look back, as the Celt always will look back, to the golden age. You were nourished on memories of that time when Ireland was, according to the tradition of her historians and of folk-lore, the island of saint and scholar. You look back to the work of St. Patrick, who, I may remark, first converted Ulster before he took in hand the rest of Ireland. We have relics of those days in the luminous pages of your manuscripts and in the rare work of cross and chalice which now lie in your museums. All that time, while we in England were growing slowly into a united nation, with a consolidated government, in Ireland, whatever the reason, the great privilege was not yours because for centuries there was disunion, and the stable government which broadened from age to age, following precedent with us, had no such chance with you. This struggle for centuries culminated at a time when hell was let loose throughout the whole of Europe, and it is good that we should now forget those days. With you, as with the rest of Europe—to use the words of one of your own historians—"The soul of man was bloodied and bruised," but now murdering hate is a dead thing, and once more in this struggling world the love of God has some chance to contend against the eternal stupidity of mankind.

The rule of reason is slowly emerging from the riot of violence, and is throughout the world cleansing the foul parts of the infected world with its medicine. In that process the veil of illusion has been rent, but as compensation the rhetoricians are silent, and it always seems to me that, with the first sense of responsibility and the passage into full freedom, one of the most difficult times that can face the Celt confronts you. For the Celt of all nations is a man who has dwelt with his dreams, and to be plunged from his dreams into the white light of the twentieth century is indeed a staggering shock, and in that fierce light it is little wonder if with many another man he finds himself precipitated from the heights on which he fancied he dwelt into a pit of depression and of cynicism. But all these things will pass. They are but the consequent evils of the day, and the people will learn that salvation comes to them by the industry of their own hands and by the work of their own brains.

If they cannot achieve it in that way, they will be no more able to achieve it from Merrion Street than from Whitehall. The people must save themselves. It is a hard and painful task, as we all know, to build up. It is easy enough to destroy. It is easier to face death for an ideal than it is to face the daily duty and the daily drudgery against the forces of vice and ignorance, which have to be faced in the attainment of any ideal. But Ireland is fortunate in this, that in the North she has a statesman, an Irishman and a man of deep wisdom; and in Dublin, in the Free State, you have as statesmen men who have looked into the eyes of both life and death. They are facing an almost insuperable burden to-day with courage and honesty rare amongst statesmen.

We in England wish them well with all our hearts. We want the two Governments of Ireland to have fair play from the world. We want them to have a fair chance of settling down to their work, and so far as we are concerned I think we have given proof of the sincerity of our desires for the prosperity of Ireland. I have only one word more to add. I have been told that just as the virtue of truth, on which perhaps we English are apt to credit ourselves, is sometimes presented in a form not dissimilar from aggressiveness and insolence—I have been told that by those who do not love us—so I have been told that the Celtic virtue of courtesy is sometimes extended to a point where it almost becomes insincerity. As an illustration, I have been told that if you ask an Irish peasant how far you are from your destination, he is always more anxious to give you satisfaction than information, and the illimitable distance you have to travel before you reach your journey's end—the land of heart's desire—is to him only "just beyond the hill." That is a failing of all people with prophetic souls.

That ideal state, to which Mr. Cosgrave would lead his people along an Irish road, and to which I would lead mine along an English road, we tell each other is just over the hills. We know in our hearts we shall never reach it, but if we did not believe that it was only just over the hills we should never have the strength to go through that dreary, dusty walk in attending to the needs of the caravan on its journey day by day throughout this world. Our courses are set the same. Our goal is the same. Our method of travelling may be different, but it is because our paths run alongside, and because you have asked me here to-night, that I feel we may now fairly join hands as we proceed across that narrow strip of water, those of us who live on this side and you who live on that.

WALES

AT THE ST. DAVID'S DAY DINNER

2nd March, 1925

I suppose that when an Englishman comes to dine with you he tries to find some link by which he may explain his presence. In asking me you have asked one that was born and bred, and whose people have lived for a very long time, in those border counties where in the old days we knew a great deal about you. In Shropshire, whence my family migrated into Worcestershire to get a little farther from the border, there are still to-day, I believe, about one-fifth of all the castles that exist in England. Why they were crowded into that narrow area I have no idea. And when I do go home and look from my garden, four miles across the valley is the hill on which, according to tradition, Owen Glendower had his camp, on, I think, the last invasion of our county by the Welsh.

My family has some connection with Wales if you go back far enough. Long, long years ago there were two Baldwins who tossed a coin at some remote place on the Continent, and one went East, where he became King of Jerusalem, and thereby preceded by about a thousand years Sir Herbert Samuel, and another went West, crossed over, first into England and then into Wales, where his name was softened, as you soften everything in Wales, and he gave his name to what we in England call the county of Montgomery.

Another century slipped by, and an archbishop of my name, translated to Canterbury from Worcester, went on a pilgrimage into Wales. He went with a very specific object. He knew that the Welsh were devout, and he had been told that they made most admirable foot soldiers, so he tried to secure them for the Crusades, and he took with him an eloquent archdeacon and journalist by name Giraldus. I regret to say, however pure one's motives, the twelfth century differed little from the present. There were those who said that my ancestor, if I may call him so, really went to Wales because he wished by celebrating Mass at the High Altar of each of the four Welsh cathedrals to establish the supremacy of Canterbury. I don't know whether that was true, but some of the priests in Wales, thinking that it was, did their best to impede his progress, though without success, and the only part of Wales in which this holy man met with an unfavourable reception, I regret to say, was in the county of Carnarvon. It is a source of infinite regret to me that the distinguished representative of that part of Wales[1] is unable to be present to-night, for we might then have got to the bottom of this secular trouble. But so undisturbed am I by what happened all those centuries ago that I am thinking this summer of starting on a pilgrimage myself, not by palfrey, but by motor-car, and I shall leave Bewdley by what we still call the Welsh Gate and go to preside over—a word of ten letters signifying a national festival—to be held at a little town of eight letters.[2]

It is strange, indeed, to look at the border country to-day and to think that it was for so long by Severn and Wye a scene of interminable raids. Now there is no more peaceful part of England than that of which the Shropshire poet wrote:

We tried, it is true, in those days to keep you out of England, and now we come to do homage to you in our own capital, of which you have almost taken possession. Not for the first time in history have the Greeks defeated their conquerors, and, indeed, this country had a very narrow escape in the years immediately succeeding the War from the imposing of Welsh as the diplomatic language of Europe.

There are times in the life of a Prime Minister when he is able, not without difficulty, to get away from his arduous work and disappear for a short time unseen by the public and unknown to the Press. I had the good fortune so to disappear and find myself by accident in the studio of a Chelsea sculptor. When there I saw an exquisitely beautiful statue of a young shepherd, the original of the figure which now stands in a mountain village in Merionethshire—the figure of a poet (Hedd Wyn) who took his part in the Great War. You have all heard of the story of this private soldier in the trenches who had written a poem for your great festival at Birkenhead, and how he was killed on Pilkem Ridge before he received the crown that would have been given to him; and the sculptor explained to me that the poet's Hero had been composed of Prometheus and the Man of Nazareth—the energy that makes for kindliness and beauty; whenever I think of Wales, it is not of her industrial areas, but of the country, and I look upon that figure as a type of what our rural civilisation can produce. That poet has again proved the truth of the old saying that "The Celt goes forth to battle and has always fallen"; but there is the additional truth that there are some defeats which mean more than victories, and which are in themselves victories everlasting.

Finally, I would like to remind you of the beautiful words used by St. David the last time he spoke to his own people:

"Be joyful and keep your faith, and believe and perform the small things which you have heard and seen with me, and I will go the road which our fathers have travelled. Be courageous while you are upon the earth, for you will not see me any more in this world."

If that can still be a message to the people of these islands, and if they will listen to it, we shall have nothing to fear in the future, and the name of St. David will go down the ages blessed by the English as well as by the Welsh.

GLASGOW

AT GLASGOW

1st October, 1925

It is a matter of peculiar pride to become a burgess of a city which is one of the most famous in the world. There can be few corners of the world into which the fame and name of Glasgow have not penetrated, and where there cannot be found some product of your manifold energies, and, in these latter days, where the echoes of the voices of your Parliamentary representatives have not been heard. I know full well that the honour you have done me is to me as first Minister of the Crown, and I believe you have made me this presentation as a recognition that I have tried, at any rate, to discharge my duties as the chief servant of the people in no party spirit, and that you mean it as an encouragement to try to go forward and do better.

I am receiving the great honour from you at a time of very grave difficulty. No progressive country has ever been free or ever will be free from difficulties. We have come through a prolonged and terrific struggle for our very existence, we are borne down under a burden of taxation resulting from that struggle, we are perplexed by the changes occurring under our eyes in the channels of the world trade on which we are so dependent, and we are profoundly depressed at the thought of the numbers of unemployed, and of the continuance of unemployment.

Nothing could be easier than to paint a sombre picture full of shadows, and to ask ourselves: "Does Scotland stand where she did?" or "Is England played out?" But that would not be a true picture. The life of Glasgow is the story in miniature of the whole country—the gradual evolution, the increase in population, power and prosperity. It was not so long ago, as the generations of men are reckoned, that Glasgow was but a village, and almost before the people realised what was happening her traders began to go out over the seas of the world. The Clyde was deepened, coal and iron were discovered in your neighbourhood, your great series of pioneers and inventors from James Watt to Lord Kelvin made their names and the name of the city known throughout the world, and in two short centuries Glasgow passed from being a little country town into a mighty city of a million souls, which has drawn into its vortex not only the people from the glens of the North, but from the farming country and, indeed, from overseas, so that you now have a fourth part of the population of Scotland packed together in this area in a density greater than that which exists in most of our English towns. The story of Glasgow is thus a story of stupendous adventure and achievement, answering to some of the deepest instincts of human nature. Such a story has not been achieved without strain and conflict, and even loss. Past generations have left to us a city, and we have to maintain its character, noted particularly for the fierce energy of its people, the high quality of their workmanship, and the boldness of their municipal enterprise. It is true to say that the labours of Glasgow, industrial, commercial and municipal, have profoundly affected the current of modern civilisation in all parts of the world, and have affected it largely for good.

This has been done by the co-operation of mind and brain. There has been no standing still; there is no standing still to-day. We have to remember that while in the time of our fathers the changes that always came, came slowly, what is apt to disconcert us is the speed at which changes come to-day—changes social, industrial and commercial. To-day the chemist is revolutionising industry. We are beginning to make various things by artificial processes which might have seemed like miracles a quarter of a century ago. To-day I am to have the pleasure of seeing a great municipal experiment which you are making in order to learn whether you cannot light your city, dye your clothes, clear your atmosphere and drive your motor cars out of coal. It is this ceaseless activity that has made Glasgow what she is, and that is the hope of her future.

What Burke said of the State is true of the city. We have a partnership, not only between those who are living, but a partnership over many generations with those who have gone before us and with those who will follow us. The life of a city is a continuous thing, a living organisation, and its citizens are members not only of one another but heirs of those who went before. And so, while we inherit a civilised way of life and opportunities and comforts and pleasures far beyond the dreams of our ancestors, it is also true that we cannot escape inheriting the very texture of city life, the results of the failings of good men and of the sins of evil men.

No problem which faces Glasgow is greater than that of housing, our inheritance from an age when the Industrial Revolution swept so quickly through the land that it had done its work before people realised that it had come at all. Quite apart from the essential wrong of such conditions of housing as still exist to-day, there is no doubt that those conditions are the most fertile source of that social discontent which is known so well in this city, as in other congested parts of the kingdom. Grievous as it may be to see social discontent, it is yet a better thing than cynical indifference or lazy acquiescence in conditions such as I saw in this city yesterday afternoon. I know how aggravated the problem is here, particularly through the tenement-house system and through the rush of immigration. It is not for us to apportion blame; it is a waste of time to do so. We are all to blame, and we have all come short of perfection. Let us see that our sympathy is not wasted in noisy declamation or in mere fault-finding. Let us rather wed the social enthusiasm that does exist here to experience and reason. The task of improving the worst quarters in our great cities is hard enough to demand the co-operation of the best men and women of all classes, and those who withstand such an aim, whether from a selfish regard for their wealth or property, or from a desire to monopolise their skill and exploit the city—these people, in whatever ranks of life they are found, are the worst enemies of the communal life.

I am convinced myself that the day will come when we shall have to eviscerate our great cities, a tremendous task, but one to which the imagination and the vision and the wisdom of the best of us may well be devoted. The task is enormous, and therefore it is all the better worth doing. I like to think that even at a time like this, when we are preoccupied with unemployment and the hardship arising out of it, we are yet giving our minds to try to raise up in this kingdom better, healthier, more beautiful communities than exist to-day, and I should like to think that I am becoming a burgess of your city at a time when the public conscience is stirred on these matters as never before, and when in Glasgow there are those who are striving might and main to make Glasgow what she once was and might be again, namely, one of the fairest cities in the kingdom. In that high task I would fain be associated with my fellow-burgesses. I shall follow you in your struggle to solve the problems that surround you, knowing that as you accomplish them you are not only making Glasgow better, happier, healthier and more prosperous, but are contributing in large measure to the security, prosperity and happiness of the people at large in these islands which are our home.

ANGLO-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP

THE ANNUAL RE-UNION DINNER OF THE BRITISH WAR MISSIONS TO THE UNITED STATES

29th April, 1925

Looking back, I think that if there was one thing that struck our delegates, on whatever task they were engaged in America, it was the amazing and the generous hospitality showered on all alike by their new friends in every part of the United States. Apart from the personal side they were struck by the immense effort that the United States made in those early days of the war, when they showed an example of enthusiasm, of hard work, and of receptiveness to ideas—when they showed that natural characteristic of hero-worship, and came forward to do everything in their power to help their Allies to bring to a successful issue the terrible undertaking in which they were engaged.

Living as I was at that time in London, and working at the Treasury, I cannot help in a gathering of this kind recalling the day when the first American troops appeared in London. I do not know how the reception of those troops affected the Americans themselves. The outlook was different to them from what it was to us, but I shall never forget standing on the Horse Guards Parade watching them marching by, not to a storm of cheers, which perhaps some had expected, but in a deep, profound silence, which to me was far more moving than any cheers.

Speaking for myself, I understand what was passing through the minds and hearts of that crowd. As we looked at these young men, the pick of their nation, so fresh, so keen, so enthusiastic, with their fine military bearing, the thought that was prominent in my mind was how they had come three thousand, four thousand and five thousand miles to Europe to help us.

I wondered how it looked to them. I thought of the homes from which they had come, the strangeness of the surroundings to them, their feeling of fresh enthusiasm, of our feeling of worn but grim determination begotten of the three years of hell through which we had passed, and I could not help thinking how little, in the triumph of that march, they could realise what that fiery furnace was towards which they were going, and from which few of those early regiments could ever hope to return. It seemed to me then as impossible to cheer as I always find it impossible to applaud when I have heard the most beautiful music that stirs the soul rather than the head.

But, after all, we are here to-night to celebrate friendships which were made in a time such as I have endeavoured to depict, friendships which certainly individually, I believe, in hundreds of cases have only grown stronger with the passage of time. We thought then much of our combined and united influence on the world. Possibly the freshness of that feeling, maybe in both countries, has to some extent evaporated in the strenuous years of peace which have followed. But there is just as much need, if not more need, to-day for that understanding, for that co-operation, and for that mutual help, as ever there was in the time of war. Strangers as many of us were to each other, we rapidly became acquaintances, and acquaintances became friends, and gatherings such as these will keep those friendships alive, if indeed anything be necessary for that purpose, and we hope that through us they may help to keep alive the friendship of the nations.

If I may say one more word to the English here—it is not necessary to you, but it is necessary to our country people, and I look to you to teach our country people—it is this: it is quite true that we and the Americans have much in common, but what most English people who do not know America forget is that the essential thing for mutual understanding is to realise what we have not got in common.

The root of any differences which may occur at any time between our two peoples is the root of most of the trouble in this world—it is the root of ignorance. And it is because it is one of the objects of this society to dispel and eradicate that ignorance that I rejoice in its existence and in its continuance. I think probably many of you taught America something of the nature, the quality, and the character of our people, just as many of those who came from America during the war taught the same lesson to our people. But it rests with you, and I am glad to hear it from Sir Thomas Royden to-night, to carry out the good work and to teach those who have not had our advantages what we ourselves have learned, because friendship at the best of times is fragile; a friendship will not run long of itself; friendship requires care and consideration.

I do not think there is much more on that subject I can say to you, and I think that what I would say has been far better expressed by others than I could express it myself. I will content myself by using some words which were uttered more than sixty years ago, which epitomise all that I would say, and all that I hope, and all that I believe:

"Whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual."

These were the words of Abraham Lincoln. Since those words were uttered we have passed through Armageddon together. May the friendship between the two nations, based on mutual knowledge and understanding, be perpetual for the benefit of the whole world.

FRIENDLY SOCIETIES

AT STOURPORT, AT THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE ANCIENT ORDER OF FORESTERS (STOUR VALLEY)

18th February, 1924

It is not wasting words to try to realise what the great friendly society movement stands for. Like many other good things, it is of pure English growth, and owes its origin to the common people from whom many of the best things have come. It springs, as it were, from the soil, and has been a great instrument during a period of rapid change in instructing our people in some of the greatest of the principles which should guide their lives, as well as in branches of work and learning in many subjects in which they could have no other teacher.

Immersed as my life has become in political work, I am glad that in the friendly society movement we know no politics. Politics have such powers of penetrating most things that I am thankful that this movement has never been captured by any of the political machines, and I hope its leaders will see to it in the future that it remains a thing apart.

A man entering a court or lodge gets his first insight into the common problem of Government; learns to control himself by working with others; learns to work with others for the benefit of others, and to exercise discrimination and judgment. I have also seen how the savings of the many can be utilised to fertilise the public services and the social activities of the country. The whole spirit of the movement is service for others, a spirit which is more wanted in England and in every country of the world to-day than any other; but because of the great influence and position of our own country there is no other in which that spirit needs to be more manifested, since the greater part of mankind looks to us as to the one country which they hope and believe will set the example to the world in the stability and probity of its finances and in its willingness to be of service to the rest of the distracted world. By teaching our own people the spirit of service which the friendly societies inculcate, we are playing our part in making our democracy fitter and nobler, and by doing that we are not only helping ourselves but the whole world.

HARROW

AT THE DINNER OF THE HARROW ASSOCIATION

19th July, 1923

Thanks be to Heaven there is in every English boy an unconscious but impregnable resistance to every form of pressure made by any schoolmaster who works him too hard or tries to put too much inside him. I know that was so in my own case and in that of many who have done far more work in the world than I have. It is to this that Englishmen owe so largely the careful cultivation of their physical growth. They let the body grow, undisturbed by mental storms, until they got into their early twenties, and then they go out into the world able to graft the sane mind on to the sane body. They have not worked out their minds before they come to tackle the problems of the world.

I cannot help going back into the past, seeing so many faces which call up memories of forty years ago. When a small boy at a private school I was taken, wearing a new top hat and an Eton jacket, to Lords, where I watched the Harrow Eleven winning a great victory. I remember that at the tail of the team there walked from the pavilion by far the largest schoolboy I had ever seen. The first ball that boy got he put well into the old pavilion. The boy's name was Ronald M'Neill.

I can single out to-night a man, whom I remember as captain of my house football eleven, who has just returned after a most distinguished period of service in Persia and Mesopotamia. He is known to the whole Empire as Sir Percy Cox. Not far from him is another whose name I hardly dare mention, because in those distant years he was my fag. He combined immaculate cleanliness with an immaculate manner. I am proud to call him my Right Honourable learned and gallant friend Jack Seely. Sprinkled here and there throughout the room, some of them disguised in clerical dress, are a lot of distinguished men whom I remember as ruffians in the football field.

There is no feeling that remains longer in life than the feeling that one has at thirteen or fourteen years of age, and I assure the Captain of the Eleven here to-night that in the breasts of all the small boys at Harrow to-day, that feeling of awe and reverence with which he is personally regarded will be as vivid in their bosoms fifty years hence as it is to-day.

I must pay tribute to the Fourth Form Room. The first time I made its acquaintance was when I sat for an entrance examination, and I remember so well my disappointment at finding I was among the rejected. I got over it, however, in subsequent years, when I learnt that two of the most distinguished men in public life to-day had shared my fate: one is the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the other—it is the first time I have ever been classed with first-class brains—no less a person than the late Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Birkenhead. Happy the school whose outcasts and rejected can yet make good in after life!

When the call came to me to form a Government, one of my first thoughts was that it should be a Government of which Harrow should not be ashamed. I remembered how in previous Governments there had been four or, perhaps, five Harrovians, and I determined to have six. To make a Cabinet is like making a jig-saw puzzle fit, and I managed to make my six fit by keeping the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer for myself. I think we have good reason to be content. I am very proud that it has fallen to my lot to be the next Prime Minister after Palmerston to come from Harrow, and it is a special source of pride and joy to me to know that Mr. Yates Thompson is here to-night, for he was the Head of the School when Palmerston was Prime Minister. I hope with all my heart that the present Head of the School may live to be as old as Mr. Yates Thompson, be as much respected, and be able to look back with as much pleasure at the share he took in our gathering this evening.

I have known no occasion on which it has been more difficult to find the right word to express my feelings. I stand here to-night among men who have made good in this world for their own sakes and for the sake of the School in every walk of life. I think they will agree with me—stern self-critics as all men must be who have made good—that there is only one form of congratulation in this world that is worth anything, and that is the expression of good will and the expression from your own peers—that is, from the men who themselves are working in the hard places of the world and trying to make those rough places smooth—that you have tried to do your duty. I realise as well as anyone here that the kindness you have shown me and the welcome you have given me are not so much a tribute to achievement—that, please God! may come later—but as holding out the hand to one from the same School who is now taking on himself the heaviest burden in the world. You mean by your greeting to assure me that you wish me well, as I know you do, and that whether I succeed or fail you have the belief in me that as a son of the Hill I will run straight; that I will bear my share of the burden; that if I fail I will not whine; and that if success is mine I shall not be puffed up; but that I will try in all things to follow in the footsteps of those who have trodden this same difficult path before me; and that I will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and a difficult career which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I have failed to do my best to live up to the highest ideals of the School.

SOME ANCESTORS

FROM A SPEECH TO THE NONCONFORMIST UNIONIST LEAGUE

8th April, 1924

I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist ancestry. It is curiously crossed with two very strong strains which work sometimes comfortably and sometimes very uncomfortably side by side. I have a Quaker strain that goes back to the earliest days of the Quakers, when one of my ancestors went out in the reign of William III. as a missionary to the American Colonies. He devoted half a century mainly to missionary work there and in the West Indies, where ultimately he died, leaving a name which was perhaps the most prominent and the best known of the Quaker missionaries in those Colonies.

This Quaker blood is peculiarly persistent, and I attribute to it a certain obstinacy which I find co-existing with one of the most placable dispositions that ever a man had. I find sometimes that when I conceive a matter to be one of principle I feel I would rather go to the stake than give way. It sometimes brings me into trouble, and has brought my friends into trouble, but I am afraid that characteristic will remain with me as long as I live.

But all these things have their compensations. The Quakers were by far the most persecuted body of the Nonconformists, and that strain of Quakerism makes one absolutely impervious to the abuse which necessarily occurs in public life.

To come to more modern times, I have a rather remarkable record—no less than half my great-grandfathers were Presidents of Conference. I am immensely proud of this ancestry, because they set an example which it is not easy to live up to, and up to which, in the earlier part of my life, I failed signally to live. I quoted the instance while I was in Scotland of one of my great-grandfathers who was the son of a man who fled from Scotland after the "Forty-five." He was a personal follower of John Wesley, and was, if I remember aright, ordained by him to the Wesleyan ministry. He was a man who never could have had more than a couple of pounds a week, but he was a natural scholar. He taught himself many languages, and, more remarkable still, he educated his own eldest son to take a scholarship at Cambridge, and in the next generation the same performance was repeated by the gaining of a scholarship at Oxford by the son of a father who must have been brought up on something very like that narrow and meagre income. It was, indeed, a time of plain living and high thinking.

If there is one thing more than another of which I feel ashamed to-day, it is to think how I, with the chances I had in youth—and I venture to think with the capacity to take equal advantage of them—wasted so much time when I was at the University and failed to follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before me, with far less advantages. But these things come home to us as we get older. I think, as years go by, we look more and more to those who have gone before us, and we want to feel that when our time comes to pass away we may leave some record behind us to make those who follow less ashamed of us.

A WAR MEMORIAL

AT THE UNVEILING OF THE BOARD OF TRADE WAR MEMORIAL

19th December, 1923

There is no greater honour that can fall to a man than to be asked to unveil a memorial of this kind. I am grateful to those who asked me to perform this ceremony to-day. All over the land, in stone and bronze, have arisen these memorials; memorials to help us in our recollections and to tell the world and the unborn generations of the magnitude of the sacrifice by which we attained our victory. And the unborn generations in some way are happier than we, for to them will be revealed in their true perspective the magnitude and the issues of the contest, and from them will be hidden some of the controversies, the sordid things, the selfishness and the greed which arose among the good deeds like poisonous fungi, the recollection of which will pass away with our generation. But even now, those who are here can see and estimate what the endurance and the courage of our own people were during those years, and it should be an inspiration to us for the rest of our lives.

There never was a war before this, at any rate for our country, in which the whole people was engaged directly or indirectly; a war in which men went forth to fight in the full consciousness of what they did. Not a man, whose name is commemorated on this tablet, but went forth with the full knowledge that he was fighting for what he and his countrymen believed to be right, for the liberties of the world, and those who fell, fell in a belief, perhaps hardly uttered by themselves, that somehow or another their lives might be given to promote the betterment of this world.

Seven millions perished in Europe, and here we commemorate but a tiny fraction of that vast host. Not one of those seven millions in all the countries of Europe and of the New World, but his death broke some tie of friendship, made a vacant place in some home, and the mourning for them will last with our lives. It is no use our asking that question which has so often come to the lips of disconsolate men and women, "Were their lives sacrificed in vain?" "The true sorrow of humanity consists in this, not that the mind of man fails, but that the course and demands of actions and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires." So said Wordsworth more than a hundred years ago, and his words are as true now as when he wrote them.

To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no permanent root in their hearts.

I think we ought to remember at a gathering like this, that in the Civil Service, different perhaps from many other services, only a limited number could go and fight, and the Civil Service contained many men who, had they been able, would have been in the forefront of the battle, and who, not being able to go, devoted themselves to the work of the country in their various stations in a manner deserving of the highest praise. Many lives were sacrificed in the war, sacrificed under the strain of continuous overwork as truly and in the same spirit as those who gave their lives in battle. Of no department can that be said with greater truth than of this great department to which we are proud to belong or to have belonged.

Of those whose names we commemorate here, "In the sight of the unwise, they seem to die: and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace." Peace is theirs, and we have to remember that, and it is a peace that we cannot share. Lincoln said, and I think his are words we should take from here to-day, "We must show an increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

In many ways our task is the harder, for, after all the sorrows that most of us here have been through, we have to face the world with a high courage and brave heart for the allotted time that may be left, and devote ourselves each in his own vocation to the service of our common humanity, knowing well that it is only by the united efforts of men and women that we can maintain our civilisation at the level to which it has been raised, and that only by super-human effort can we better it. To try to do that is the least we can do for those who gave their lives for us. It is only in proportion as we go out into the world to do what we can for the world, that we can answer that question at the end and say, "They have not died in vain."

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Our thanks are due to the Editors of the Times, the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph, the Yorkshire Post, the Student and the English Race, and to Mr. John Murray for the permission they have kindly given us to make use of the texts of the Prime Minister's addresses published by them.