Chapter III: Part 3

I want to see the spirit of service to the whole nation the birthright of every member of the Unionist Party--Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world. I urge on you all as workers in that great Unionist Party to render all the service you can to the common weal in the districts in which you live. There is always work and to spare for human betterment in every parish in the country. And to all those workers for the Party and members of Parliament, I say this in conclusion: You cannot better serve your Party, and through the Party your country, than in dedicating your lives to that service.

TRUTH AND POLITICS

ON INAUGURATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

6_th November_, 1925

The first duty of a Lord Rector is to thank his constituents for the honour they have done him in electing him to that great and historic office.

But beyond the honour, of which they are no less conscious than he, lies the unique service unconsciously rendered to a Rector who is normally immersed in public affairs.

Though "to be at sea" is a phrase used by landsmen to denote instability of purpose and absence of sense of direction, it must be acknowledged that we landsmen have much to learn when we are at sea, if we will. We learn that there are two things on a ship that are not done. A sailor does not spit on the deck, thereby strengthening his self-control and saving unnecessary work for someone else; nor does he speak to the man at the wheel, thereby leaving him to devote his whole mind to his task and increasing the probability of the ship arriving at or near her destination. In matters of State, having selected a man for the wheel, we do everything we can to distract his attention and to prevent him, if possible, from having time in which he may consider for a moment where he is going.

Therein is the service of which I spoke, that you compel your Rector to make time, though it be out of fragments, in which he may reflect on the course of national affairs in a more objective and detached way than is usually possible for him. You force him to pause and ponder and present his reflections for your consideration. It is not surprising if the result is that his thoughts should turn towards you and that he should find himself driven to ask: what is the special contribution which men and women educated at our universities can make to the world?

You who are students in Edinburgh have a high reputation to maintain. It was of this University that it was once declared by a competent witness:

"I may truly say that it is not easy to conceive a university where industry is more general, where reading is more fashionable, where indolence and ignorance are more disreputable."

I hope you recognise yourselves to-day in the words of Sir James Macintosh, written a hundred years ago.

I shall not pitch my expectations too high. The fraction of life which you spend at the University is small, and there have been other forces continuously at work before you came here moulding your lives. It is the education received unconsciously that counts for most in the making of a man. The University can only work within the limits of the human material which it receives from the homes and schools of the country. It can provide a favourable soil for the developing intelligence under the supervision of expert gardeners, but it cannot grow figs from thistles.

The University is a rich storehouse of knowledge, and some fragments of its treasures do somehow find their way into the possession of the students. The University is also an instrument for increasing knowledge, and some students, a small proportion, do contrive to add to the accumulated learning of the ages. They settle "οτι's] business, properly base ουν, and give us the doctrine of the enclitic γε."

But, besides, or rather in the process of, transmitting and increasing knowledge and training ability, the University is a school of character. That is true not only of the common room and the playing field; it is also true of the lecture room and laboratory.

The ideal character is a harmony of many virtues, and it is a tradition amongst us to give to truthfulness the position of the cardinal virtue. Hence, for example, the curious power of Lord Althorp, who was known to have said to the House of Commons, "I know this to be right. I cannot remember why--but you may take it that it is so," and they believed him. And if the noblest exercise of freedom is the pursuit of truth, the best equipment for the search is to be truthful. The inculcation of the practice of truthfulness, no less than the acquisition of knowledge, is the motive force of our educational system. The student is here to learn habits of accuracy in measurement, precision in statement, honesty in handling evidence, fairness in presenting a cause--in a word, to be true in word and deed. That is the goal of British education, because it is recognised that no man can be a worthy citizen whose word cannot be trusted and whose deed is compounded of deceit.

Men think by means of words and communicate with each other through their medium. This "most noble and profitable invention of speech is man's proudest triumph over nature, without which there had been amongst men neither commonwealth nor society, nor contract nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves."[1] Words are the currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace and war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like great tides of the sea: "Lest we forget." "Patriotism is not enough."

There is a well-known passage in the writings of John Stuart Mill, where he doubts whether all the inventions of machinery have on balance added to human happiness. I am always reminded by that passage of another in John Locke, where he is so impressed with the defects of language as to affirm that if anyone "shall well consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that are spread in the world by an ill-use of words, he will find some reason to doubt whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of knowledge among mankind."[2]

The Scottish are cautious, it has been said, because they have lived with one another for so long. You are capable of practising great restraint and economy in the use of words, but I do not think that even you will go as far as Locke and wish to put us all into a Trappist monastery. Such knowledge as there is in the world has been built up by the help of words. A civilisation without words is perhaps conceivable, but under it the life of man would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But if we cannot go all the way with Locke, we can agree with his successor, Bentham, that "error is never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in language." "Improper terms are the chains which bind men to unreasonable practices. Every improper term contains the germ of fallacious propositions; it forms a cloud, which conceals the nature of the thing, and presents a frequently invincible obstacle to the discovery of truth."[3] It is in a similar mood that Mr. Wells complains of the fluidity of thought and the fixity of language. Master of English as he is, he finds its terms solid, opaque, and stable, and therefore "incurably inaccurate." That is not merely a defence of philosophic doubt, but a conclusion of despair which, if we accepted it literally, would close all universities to-morrow and destroy all foundations of belief.

No small part of education lies in learning the right use of words, in tracing their birth and behaviour, in fitting them closely to facts and ideas. That is why you are here invited to study the Humanities not only for their own fair sake, but for the discipline which is experienced in the manipulation of two of the finest instruments ever devised to express the minds of men. Through the Humanities you should learn not only something of the polity and law, the poetry and eloquence of the ancient world, but you should learn the value of the words of your own native tongue. No man who can do good Greek and Latin prose can deceive people with words except he sin against the light. He can no longer be deceived himself. He will know that to use words equivocally is prostitution. Nor does he need to use italics in speech or writing. Headlines cannot hypnotise him, and the latest sensation is already stale.

Through mathematics we learn on the very threshold a lesson which, if universally known and applied, would prevent most of the ills to which the world is heir. To know and realise that two and two make four and can in no circumstances make anything else is to be equipped with knowledge that will save us daily from mistakes, unpleasant to ourselves, and possibly disastrous to others. I know that some of Euclid's axioms, which appear to common sense to be necessary, are now declared by mathematicians "to derive their appearance of necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from any _a priori_ logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to show the possibility of spaces differing from that in which we live."[4] But even these daring speculators assure us that in any possible world they feel that two and two would be four and that this is not a mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible must conform.[5] Whatever be the case in a world of Einsteins, or in Russia, over most part of the world two and two are still believed to make four. Without that knowledge or in the belief that two and two may in a certain environment make five, you may indeed upset a constitution, but you will never make an engine, nor, if you were in possession of a ship, could you bring it into any port in the world. Those, therefore, who would navigate the ship of State, if they would avoid shipwreck, had better base their sailing orders on this platitudinous verity.

Through all your studies of the physical sciences you are being taught a similar lesson. Principles are constantly being subjected to the test of fact, purified in the furnace of experiment. Working hypotheses are being confronted with masses of detail, and as a result are discarded, revised, or quickened. You strive to compel the material facts of the world to reveal their nature, you watch and record their behaviour, and truth is the accurate statement of the facts observed. By means of this discipline you learn that things are what they are and the consequences will be what they will be. In other words, that as you sow you will reap, and a wrong combination of elements will send you through the roof when your desire is to remain with your feet firmly planted on the earth.

Lastly, there is the study of the ultimate science, the science of sciences, of moral philosophy for which this University has been so justly famous. There was a time when it might be said that the chief export of Scotland, measured in values, was metaphysics. It was to this University that more than one Prime Minister came from England to sit at the feet of Dugald Stewart. The penetration of English practice by Scottish reflection was one of the most fruitful results of the Union, and is still happily proceeding in the person of our distinguished Chairman (the Earl of Balfour).

Philosophy forces the student to examine the assumptions on which all the other sciences rest, the hypotheses by which they all work. You ask not only How? but Why? You challenge all appearance; you doubt science itself in your search for reality. Magic, myth, ritual, religion; the mysterious and emotional story of human belief; the theological speculations of mankind; the very instrument by which man knows anything at all--all are cross-examined as facts of experience, and an attempt is made to interpret them and fit them into some coherent explanation of our life and destiny. You cannot go any distance on this road without arriving at the distinction between true assertions and false ones, and you will not need to travel much farther before reaching the distinction between right and wrong.

Throughout all these activities in which you are engaged in this University there is the double motive of acquiring knowledge and learning to think truly. The latter is the more important task. The greatest service this or any university can render the modern world is to discharge well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send forth year after year generations of young men and women who have not only a stock of ideas but minds which turn on the poles of truth. Ability to read is not synonymous with ability to reflect on what is read. Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously. Education that has merely taught people to follow a syllogism without enabling them to detect a fallacy has left them in constant peril. And as with the fallacy so with its near relation, the half truth. For though it has been accepted through the ages that half a loaf is better than no bread, half a truth is not only not better than no truth, it is worse than many lies, and the slave of lies and half truths is ignorance. Ignorance, static and inert, is bad, but ignorance in motion, as Goethe once observed, is the most terrible force in nature, for it may destroy in its passage the accumulated mental and material capital of generations.

You will need this habit of truth when you leave this home of learning and reflection. It is our greatest national asset. The industries and commerce of this country, its enormous foreign trade, involving innumerable transactions with known and unknown customers, has been made possible not only by the enterprise of our merchants, but by their integrity. There is nowhere in the world, I believe, a higher standard of commercial honour than that which prevails in this country. And the same is true of our Courts of Law, which enjoy a world-wide prestige, nowhere better exemplified than in the Admiralty Court, to which shipowners from all over the world resort, even in cases where no British ship is in the collision or salvage operation.

Why is it, then, that when we turn to politics a lower standard of habitual truthfulness is alleged to prevail than in the world of science or of business? I am not now talking of this country more than another. I think our reputation is at least as good as that of any other country in this regard, and it has grown in the last 100 years, and is growing. The scientist is assumed to be a truth-lover; honesty is proverbially the best policy in business; but politicians have been despised for hypocrisy and dishonesty in all the literatures of the Old World and the New. I open the work of a brilliant Cambridge scholar and theologian, and this is what I read on the first page:

"In regard to truth, the more one reads of man's notions about the meaning and method of civil society, the more often is one inclined in despair to say that truth has as little to do with politics as it has with most politicians."[6]

And this is the verdict of a learned foreign observer at the end of an immense treatise on the pathology of party government: "To the low types which the human race has produced from Cain down to Tartuffe, the age of democracy has added a new one--the politician."

What is the explanation of this evil reputation which attaches not to politicians of one party, but to the whole race? Primarily, I suppose, it is due to the fact that ever since States began to be they have been in peril and have trusted to force for their safety. War has been their normal history. Savagery has never been far away from the realm of law. How long is it since that ceased to be true in Scotland? With war and the preparation for war go the stratagems of diplomacy, the dropping of the ordinary code of morals, a holiday for truth, and an aftermath of cynicism. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues, wrote the author of _Leviathan_. The statesman's goal is the preservation of the State, and reasons of State have been held to justify all policies whatsoever. In the arena of international rivalry and conflict men have placed patriotism above truthfulness as the indispensable virtue of statesmen. "When the entire safety of a country is at stake, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene,"[7] is a copybook maxim from the pages of a well-known exponent of the art of Government. And it was a statesman much nearer our own time who said to a group of friends: "If we had done for ourselves the things which we are doing for Italy, we should be great rascals."[8] That sounds less shocking to our ears to-day than it would have done a dozen years ago. Machiavelli's conception of mankind has not been dispelled or disproved. He is, as Lord Acton said, a constant and contemporary influence. He is in all our hearts.

We have recently been celebrating the tercentenary of the publication of the work of Grotius on International Law. Dr. Figgis, the Cambridge historian and divine, whom I quoted a moment ago, points out that the fundamental difference between Machiavelli and Grotius is concerned with the question before us. The contention of Grotius, which is denied by Machiavelli, is that human life is essentially a society, and that certain laws, of which fidelity to plighted word is the most important, are therefore as immutable as human nature. These two thinkers represent two tendencies in our public life. The principles of Machiavelli were accepted in Europe at any rate as late as the days of Cavour and Bismarck. I wish to avoid the twentieth century and examples from among the living. It was the prevailing view for centuries, openly avowed and defended, that you could have one code of morals among nations and another and much more exacting one among individuals, that you could be a Machiavellian abroad and a Christian at home. Whatever may have been our lapses we have never in this country accepted this view in the bald and summary form in which I am putting it. It was, nevertheless, a British Prime Minister who said that "No great country was ever saved by good men," which is perhaps why Lord Acton said that great men were nearly always bad men. But the shifts to which statesmen and diplomatists have resorted in the field of foreign affairs, especially in time of strain or open conflict, have helped to give all politicians a bad name.

The party system is perhaps a contributory cause. The system has its advantages, its team work, its loyalties, and others which I need not stop to describe, especially as the whole subject was most ably analysed by my colleague, Lord Cecil, in his address to the students at Aberdeen a few days ago. To our sporting countrymen it appears a game, and as such it has its rules, and these for the most part are honourably obeyed and are an important help to probity in our public life. But the party system does put a certain embargo on complete frankness of speech in the arena of debate.

But it is to a third explanation that I want to direct your attention for a few minutes more. There is a profound difference in the study of the physical and the human sciences, between the study of particles of matter and of men in society. You cannot measure and weigh, combine and distribute men as you do chemical elements. Spinoza tried something of the sort, but he did not succeed. You remember a famous passage, where he says how he had made it his especial care neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's actions, but to understand them, how he had tried to consider the emotions and agitations of men's minds, love and hatred, anger and envy, honour and pity, just as a scientist would regard heat and cold, storms and thunder. But though we sometimes speak of rhetoric as hot air, the state is not a cloud, nor, I fear, do we politicians often return in scientific showers the popular vapour which we are said to absorb.[9]

The material of politics is human nature, its motives honourable and base, its appetites for power and for service, its passions, its prejudices, its memories and aspirations. But the politician cannot work with scales and forceps, with test tube and mortar. His instruments are the written and spoken word. Politics can never be an exact science. Democracy is government by discussion, by talk. Politicians must talk, and they cannot to-day, like Pitt, confine their speeches to the House of Commons. The perils of the platform orator have been pointed out from the days of Cleon. Words have lost none of their equivocal character since his day. The difference between the Greek sophist and the modern demagogue, it is said, consists in this: the one displayed his ingenuity by appearing to prove that which his hearers knew to be false, the other displays it by appearing to prove that which his hearers wish to be true.[10] It is the business of the universities to change all this, and they are doing it.

The politician is much nearer in type to the barrister and advocate than to the scientist. The latter has no case to prove, he sits humbly before the facts and lets them speak. The advocate and the politician are more interested in persuasion than in proof. They have a client or a policy to defend. The political audience is not dishonest in itself, nor does it desire or approve dishonesty or misrepresentation in others, but it is an audience only imperfectly prepared to follow a close argument, and the speaker wishes to make a favourable impression, to secure support for a policy. It is easy to see how this may lead to the depreciation of the verbal currency and to the circulation of promises which cannot be cashed.

Closely allied with this is the pressure laid upon the politician in a democratic state to speak while important negotiations are in progress, however inconvenient the moment. The result once more is inevitably to place a veto on complete frankness, and to tempt recourse to words which are nebulous, hesitating, ambiguous, or misleading. Some of us have become as adept as the Prague poet who went to see Béranger in 1847, and had to answer a few questions. Was Prague in Hungary or in Poland? In neither one nor the other. Was Bohemia in Austria or in Germany? In both. Was the Prussian monarchy absolute or conditional? Partly one, partly the other. At last Béranger lost patience: "Frenchmen," he cried, "like things to be clear. What is not clear is not French."[11] If the subject is one of high foreign policy the wrong words may raise issues not settled by dropping pieces of paper in a ballot box but by dropping bombs on cities. That is the essential difference between the methods of politics and of business.

In these directions we may discover some mitigation of the harsh epithets used of the politician.

I come back to where I began. False words, said the dying Socrates, are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Although the use of words may be abused and the fight for their honour may at times seem hopeless, we must never give up the struggle to use them solely in the service of truth. Let us aim at meaning what we say, and saying what we mean. The price man has to pay for the good things he enjoys is constant watchfulness lest they be employed for evil. Has not this been the case from the dawn of history with drink, language, and liberty? Let us--in the language of _Leviathan_--use perspicuous words, having first snuffed and purged them from ambiguity and made them luminous. Let us take our stand on public right and a law of nations with Grotius rather than with Machiavelli; let us seek to moralise our public intercourse and reduce the area of casuistry and duplicity. That is not only the accepted principle of the best amongst us, but it is, I am sure, in harmony with a widespread instinct in the British people. It asserted itself in August 1914 when it was made plain that ethics was not a branch of politics, but the reverse. It is at the root of our support of the League of Nations at Geneva--a city with which Scotland has had spiritual ties for centuries, and from which your Churches derive their system of regulated freedom. It is truth alone that will "destroy the face of the covering cast over all people and the veil that is spread over all nations" (Isaiah xxv. 7). There is much that is profoundly wrong and remediable in our civilisation, but let us not lightly discard the gains so hardly won from the savagery which so readily besets us. In stretching forth our hands to the farther shore, let us realise that civilisation itself is but the ice formed in process of ages on the turbulent stream of unbridled human passions, and while this ice seemed to our fathers secure and permanent, it has rotted and cracked during the agony of the Great War, and in places the submerged torrent has broken through, leaving fragments in constant collision threatening by their attrition to diminish and ultimately disappear. The more need for you, the lampbearers of your generation, to guide your own steps by the truth, and to light the way for the wandering people of the world.

[1] _Leviathan_, I, iv.

[2] _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_, Book III, Chapter XI, Par. 4.

[3] _On Evidence_, Book III, Chapter I.

[4] Bertrand Russell: _Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 320.

[5] _Ibid._, p. 121.

[6] Figgis: _From Gerson to Grotius_.

[7] Machiavelli: _Treatise on Livy_.

[8] G. M. Trevelyan: _Garibaldi and the Making of Italy_, Chap. I.

[9] _Tractatus Politicus_, quoted in Pollock's life, p. 300; cf. Von Hügel, _The German Soul_, p. 67, and Acton, _Historical Essays and Studies_, p. 479.

[10] C. Cornewall Lewis: _Use and Abuse of Political Terms_, p. 12.

[11] Acton: _Historical Essays and Studies_, p. 474.

RHETORIC

AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNION

_March_, 1924

I sometimes think that possibly a man's views of rhetoric may be coloured according to whether he possesses it or is without it; this may be the reason why Mr. Mitchell Banks, who has made such an eloquent plea, finds himself in opposition to me. I have never been a rhetorician or an orator. I attribute this largely to the fact that, much as I used to enjoy reading speeches, I was greatly struck when I was about eighteen, at coming across a phrase in Froude, "Oratory is the harlot of the arts," illustrated, as Froude could illustrate it, with a wealth of eloquence! There is nothing odd about that, because you will remember that there was no one who fulminated more against rhetoric than Carlyle, probably the greatest rhetorician who ever put pen to paper. I was reading in him only the other day that the best thing man could do was to doom himself to eternal silence, which Carlyle never could do, except when he was smoking a pipe with Tennyson.

Mr. Theobald (the mover of the resolution) made a most characteristic remark in his definition of rhetoric, a definition on which a good deal depends. He defined it as a marshalling of facts which were likely to persuade people. I entirely agree with him, except that he has left out the other half of the sentence, which is the essence of my case: "Concealing the facts which are likely to dissuade people." There is a good deal more in rhetoric than the marshalling of facts, otherwise the _Origin of Species_ would have been the greatest work of rhetoric the world has produced.

To tell the truth needs no art at all, and that is why I always believe in it. We have each attempted our own definition of rhetoric. I would rather define it by illustrations of what I mean by rhetoric, which I regard as one of the greatest dangers of modern civilization. I am going to give you two or three phrases which I call rhetorical phrases, and each of them, to my mind, is pregnant with darkness and confusion. Consider this one of three words from one of the greatest rhetoricians of the ages: "Bulging corn bins." "The democratic control of the means of production" is another. I tried in the House of Commons to get that last phrase translated from rhetorical English into English that I could understand, and the only answer I got was that it was impossible to produce rabbits from a top hat. "Self-determination" is another rhetorical term that may some day lead the nations into a bloody war. That is what rhetoric does. "Homes fit for heroes to live in," and "A world safe for democracy!" These, to my mind, are the quintessence of rhetoric, and it is against rhetoric in this sense that I am going to vote to-night.

I suppose every one will admit that a great rhetorician was Charles Fox, who said something which illustrates my point very clearly: "If a speech reads well it must be a damned bad speech." I mean by this that Mr. Mitchell Banks will read his speech to-morrow morning with less pleasure than that with which he heard the cheers for it to-night. Rhetoric is meant to get the vote of a division or at an election, but God help the man who tries to think on it!

Such speeches as have been quoted in support of rhetoric could not be delivered nowadays. The character and temper of the audience and the people have so changed that what may have been possible for Macaulay is impossible to-day. The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky--flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind?

That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror. Very rarely do we find the gift given to men who have wisdom and constructive power, and for the time being it would seem that it was in this world a force far beyond its merits, although in the more advanced countries I sometimes hope that it is past its prime. At least I believe that in England and Scotland at any rate rhetoric of the kind I have tried to describe no longer makes that appeal to the people.

I think it may be that the people of this country are getting just the least bit suspicious of the literary rhetoric of our Sunday Press, and of our daily Press, and that this very wholesome dread, this wholesome nervousness, is being transferred from the Press to the platform. I think that throughout this country there is to-day a far greater desire than there has ever been before to hear plain, unadorned statements of cases. I believe that anyone who has taken part in recent elections--a few constituencies excepted--will agree with me that one of the most remarkable features is the way in which large audiences all over the country will listen to a statement of a case, whether they agree with it or not, provided they feel that the statement is made honestly and fairly, and with due consideration for the opposite view.

Let us always remember this: when we come to big things we do not need rhetoric. Truth, we have always been told, is naked. She requires very little clothing. After all, St. Paul was no orator, and yet his speeches and his teaching seem to have spread and to have lasted a long time. I cannot help feeling that if we were to go back two thousand years I would back St. Paul and the results of his teaching against all the rhetoric of a Sunday paper or of the leading orators of the age.

If there is one thing which those who have been in any other profession than the Bar distrust more than another it is the eloquent man. In the business world, other things being equal, the man who has the power of talking is not the man who gets promotion. To be able to express oneself in business is always to be written down as being not quite first-class, and it is a joyous fact that in most of the towns of the kingdom we find that the men of business who talk most in such places as Chambers of Commerce are not the men who are making a success of the big businesses in the country. From this I argue that it is not necessarily the man most fluent of speech to whom we should entrust the destinies of the country.

_ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS_

THE CLASSICS

TO THE CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION

8_th January_, 1926

The Classical Association flings its boundaries far and wide, embracing as it does the learned and the simple, the just and the unjust, the half-timers, the whole-timers and the over-timers, the leisured, the wealthy and the poor. All that is asked of a prospective member is that he should love the Classics. Love does not necessarily imply comprehension, or which of us could say that he loved a woman?--but it does mean love of the beautiful, love of the best, love of the ideal. Such love is not rare, and it is well that those who have it should join together and gather strength and refreshment by such communion as the present. I can speak of these things with understanding, for I am an original member of the Association, and I well remember the pleasure with which I sent my first subscription from the depths of the country in which I was then living and received in due course the annual volume of the _Proceedings_, together with the President's Address for the year. It seems to me now, as it seemed to me then, that there could be no greater honour than to be invited to give the Presidential Address. It never occurred to me that that honour was to be mine. I certainly had no qualifications for it, nor indeed have I now. But I take heart from the thought that though the lamp of classical learning must be trimmed and kept burning by the scholars, yet the light which is diffused depends to some extent on the fuel, and that is provided by an army of plain folk with conviction and enthusiasm in their hearts.

The Classics will never perish out of the land so long as they are cherished by ordinary people. And so it seems to me good that you should have a President occasionally who is not a scholar, who is not particularly distinguished, but who can speak for the common folk as an ordinary man.

I wonder how many of you remember your Eginhard? I have always had in mind a passage of his which I read forty years ago. Charlemagne was a statesman, but not a scholar. He acquired such knowledge of Latin that he used to repeat his prayers in that language as well as in his own. Greek he could understand better than he could pronounce. But he was an ardent admirer of the liberal arts, and greatly revered their professors, whom he promoted to high honours. He also tried to write, and used to keep his tablets and writing-book under the pillow of his couch that when he had leisure he might practise his hand in forming letters; but he made little progress in a task too long deferred and begun too late in life. _Absit omen_! And since I have alluded to the weakness of so great a man in his pronunciation of Greek, perhaps I may take advantage of this opportunity to seek on my own behalf your indulgence if, in the few Latin words that I may use hereafter, I pronounce Latin as it was taught to me fifty years ago. I have lived for many years in a backwater, and the flood of culture has swept forward far away from me. I speak not as the man in the street even, but as a man in a field-path, a much simpler person steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas. To pronounce Latin as our Association has decreed may be to Professor Postgate the breaking of an adhesion; to me it is to convert it at once into a foreign language. And I have been the more impressed that my experience is not void of truth because I noticed with interest, when my own University did me the high honour of conferring a doctor's degree upon me, each learned man who had occasion to speak the Latin tongue spoke it with a different accent. Is my apology accepted?

Before I attempt to tell you what I conceive to be the debt of the ordinary man to the Classics, may I, as one whose work has for many years past been given in the field of politics, pause a few moments to inquire what help our studies may bring to the ordinary man who is attempting the task of government?

To be an Englishman, native of a country which was an integral part of the Roman Empire for a period as long as from the Reformation until this present night, and to be ignorant of the history of that Empire, is to be without that sense of perspective in viewing both the change of events and their day-to-day reactions which is essential to see our national life and to see it whole.

_Ne sutor supra crepidam_ may be true for the cobbler, but the statesman must endeavour, like the sculptor, to envisage the whole figure, and he must be steeped to the lips in the historical sense. It was not for nothing that Western Europe was forged on the anvil of Rome, and who can say how much we owe to those long years of Roman law, Roman discipline, Roman faith, and partnership in a common Empire?

During the first four centuries of the present era Roman thought and Roman manners imposed themselves upon our island and made themselves a home here. Rome must have seemed very real and present to the children of the near-by hamlets as they saw the great roads creeping towards them, past them, and ever onwards in ruthless and undeviating course, making the farthest ends of the island pervious to the legions' tread. Shy traffickers coming from wild fastnesses as they chanced upon a Roman highway and, shading their eyes with their hands, saw it pass into the horizon, must have been awed at the thought of the great heart that beat at the end of that giant artery. Beautiful buildings, kindly plants and flowers now so familiar came in the wake of the eagles and sank their foundations and their roots in English soil. It may well be that subconscious memories of those days and the mingling of blood for four centuries played their part no less than the arrival of the Normans in modifying certain characteristics of our Teutonic invaders and saved us from becoming what Carlyle called "A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no grand combinations, lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity; not dreaming of heroic toil, and silence and endurance, such as leads to the higher places of this universe and the golden mountain-tops where dwell the Spirits of the Dawn."

Only a few short centuries before the age of Pericles, only a few short centuries after the fall of Troy, there was but a settlement of shepherds on the Palatine Hill. Yet within a thousand years the tramp of the Roman sentinel was heard along the Wall; his watch-fires illuminated the waters of Euphrates; the hand of Rome reached from the Biscay to the Euxine, from the Danube to the Nile.

Here is the greatest, most fascinating problem in all history for the scholar and the statesman. Why did the Empire come into existence at all, and why, having come into existence, did it perish? Volumes have been written on the subject and will continue to appear; but is it not allowed to the statesman whose material is human nature to dwell on one aspect of the story to the exclusion of others, equally obvious and equally true? Surely the character of the Roman played as great a part in the rise of the Empire as his character played in the fall? I can imagine no historian of the British Empire neglecting the study of the character of the Englishman, as shown, for example, in the Elizabethan age and through the period of the Rebellion. And to me the outstanding and peculiar strength of the Roman character lies in the words _pietas_ and _gravitas_. These were the foundations of a patriotism which alone could carry the burden of Empire, a patriotism innate, a motive force of incalculable power, yet something at its best so holy that it was never paraded, sought no reward, was taken for granted, and had no single word to express it.

Bounded at first by the confines of the city, it differed from Greek patriotism in that it had in it the seeds of life and growth, and it expanded with the spread of the Roman name. Such patriotism is not unknown amongst us, and so long as it exists it will leaven much. As has been well pointed out, the highest gifts devoted to public service were expected; to dedicate and employ them for the sake of the Republic was merely your duty. Aristides would not have been called the Just in Rome, and in what country in the Ancient World but Rome would a Fabricius have refused all rewards, or a Cincinnatus have returned to his farm? Again, a character founded on pietas and gravitas had its roots in truth, and I am proud to think that the English word has been held in no less honour than the Roman. It would be an interesting study to trace the changes in the Roman character which accompanied the social developments through the chequered history of the Empire. This is the happy task of the historian, and it must suffice for me in these few minutes to pause before certain salient facts. It is from Ammian, who wrote while the legions were leaving Britain, that we learn that the Roman word could no longer be trusted. That is to me a far more significant portent than the aggregation of the population in cities, the immense luxury, and the exhaustion of the permanent sources of wealth, all of which combined to sap that very character whose continued existence was necessary for the life of the State. We hear through these later centuries cries with which we are only too familiar to-day, cries against the burden of armaments and the weight of taxation. But above and beyond these things, dangerous and symptomatic as they are, we detect a greater cause for anxiety. It would almost appear that the human stock is like the stock of fruit-trees where the best kinds tend to work themselves out after many generations of useful and productive service. Mr. Mackail, in one of his recent Essays, has laid fresh stress on this point when he says there were not enough Romans left to carry on the work of Rome. A gradual atrophy of intellectual energy and public spirit spread over the body politic, and the instinct of self-government was lost. There are fears amongst those who are responsible for government to-day, fears not yet gripping us by the throat but taking grisly shape in the twilight, that the Great War, by the destruction of our best lives in such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to carry on the work of Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished; yet who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West, and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome? She has left danger-signals along the road; it is for us to read them.

And as we do so we may look, as she did, at another history. That Roman Empire, of which we were once a part, embraced all the countries occupied by people of Hellenic blood. Less in the direct historical succession, though more in the spiritual, the statesman has much to learn from Greece. Her history, as has often been pointed out, is one long failure to create an Empire. Her problem was nearer ours in kind than that of Rome, for her solution, had it been effected, would have resulted in a Commonwealth of Nations rather than an Empire on the Roman model. There was no experiment she did not try to win organic unity, but she was defeated by those very characteristics of intellect and temperament which raised her to such heights in poetry, art, and philosophy. Civic unity she could never achieve, and her attempts to weld together people of the blood were foiled on the very threshold. Failure is in many ways a more potent teacher than success, and the tragedy of her history only throws into more radiant relief the debt we owe her in those arts wherein she was supreme. She spoke the last word in beauty of speech and of form; her creations are the touchstone to-day as they were two thousand years ago, and it is a comforting thought, in these days particularly, that whatever fails to pass this test must ultimately perish from among us as barbarous and exotic.

And here, perhaps, we may take two thoughts to heart which come to my mind as I try to look forward. Believing as I do that much of the civilisation and culture of the world is bound up with the life of Western Europe, it is good for us to remember that we Western Europeans have been in historical times members together of a great Empire, and that we share in common, though in differing degrees, language, law, and tradition. That there should be wars between nations who learned their first lessons in citizenship from the same mother seems to me fratricidal insanity. It should rather be our endeavour to help ourselves and to help each other to recover those qualities of character so peculiar to the Romans, the _pietas_, the _gravitas_, and the truth of the spoken word. On such foundations alone can civilisation be built; on such foundations alone can civilisation stand.

But what of us, the _ultimi Britanni_, the youngest member of the great family? I like to feel that the fortune of the youngest son is ours. I like to picture the procession of the nations through the ages as a great relay race of heroes. Over a course infinitely hard, with little experience to guide her, Rome ran her mighty race bearing her torch on high. Of those who came before, of those who followed after, none ran so far, none so surely. And when her course was run the torch came into other hands who bore it forward according to the strength and guidance that was in them, until after many centuries it was passed to us, the youngest son. Our race is not yet run. But we shall run more worthily so long as we base our lives on the stern virtues of the Roman character and take to ourselves the warnings that Rome left for our guidance.

Here I feel these modest reflections may well be brought to an end. I can imagine you saying, "Well, there may be an element of truth in what you have said, but it is all rather jejune and second-hand. What we want to know is, the impression the small amount of Latin and Greek which you possess has made upon you; what you think you have derived from it, whether you are in any way richer than you would have been had you been nursed on the Loves of the Triangles." A perfectly fair question, and I will bid the statesman fly away and the ordinary man step forward.