Part 17

That such a result would be desirable, would be in the interest of all of our colonies as well as of ourselves, I do not believe any sensible man will doubt. It seems to me that the tendency of the time is to throw all power into the hands of the greater empires, and the minor kingdoms--those which are non-progressive--seem to be destined to fall into a secondary and subordinate place. But, if Greater Britain remains united, no empire in the world can ever surpass it in area, in population, in wealth, or in the diversity of its resources.

Let us, then, have confidence in the future. I do not ask you to anticipate with Lord Macaulay the time when the New Zealander will come here to gaze upon the ruins of a great dead city. There are in our present condition no visible signs of decrepitude and decay. The mother country is still vigorous and fruitful, is still able to send forth troops of stalwart sons to people and to occupy the waste spaces of the earth; but yet it may well be that some of these sister nations whose love and affection we eagerly desire may in the future equal and even surpass our greatness. A transoceanic capital may arise across the seas, which will throw into shade the glories of London itself; but in the years that must intervene let it be our endeavor, let it be our task, to keep alight the torch of Imperial patriotism, to hold fast the affection and the confidence of our kinsmen across the seas, that so in every vicissitude of fortune the British Empire may present an unbroken front to all her foes, and may carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag. It is because I believe that the Royal Colonial Institute is contributing to this result that with all sincerity I propose the toast of the evening.

LORD ROSEBERY.

When, in March, 1894, upon the retirement of Mr. Gladstone from public life, the Liberal party looked about, not for that impossible man who could fill his place, but for a new leader, it is a matter of recent history that the choice fell on Lord Rosebery. Mr. McCarthy has described minutely the rather intricate reasons for this choice: suffice it to say here that Lord Rosebery was summoned to the Premiership both as a compromise candidate and as the most popular Liberal before the country.

Lord Rosebery, Earl of Primrose, was a Premier who had never sat in the Lower House. Educated at Eton and Christchurch, as a minor he had succeeded to the title and hereditary seat among the Lords. As the first Chairman of the London County Council (1888), and twice as Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1886, 1892), he had shown marked abilities for public business. In the latter office, for instance, he had often worked eighteen hours a day. Nor were industry and position his only qualifications for the high honor. In the full sense of the word, Lord Rosebery was a versatile man. He had some claims to virtuosity in the arts of painting and sculpture. He had written a good deal, and creditably; he had spoken much, and well. But above all, to these accomplishments he had added an avocation perhaps the most sympathetic to the English popular mind,--the cult of the turf. As a boy, indeed, Lord Rosebery is said to have set upon at least two objects to be attained in life: the possession of the Premiership and the owning of a Derby winner. Both have already been his.

The appointment, then, so far as personal reasons went, was generally popular; but, like most compromises, it did not entirely suit the party. Lord Rosebery, though one of the comparatively few Peers in favor of Home Rule, was not so ardent or optimistic a supporter of the cause as many Liberals could have wished. Certainly his advocacy was luke-warm as compared with the consecrated fire of Mr. Gladstone’s attack. Further, he was known to be conservative in a matter upon which many of his party felt strongly, the abridgment of the powers of the Lords--here again less truly Liberal than the retiring leader.

The term of office begun under these dubious auspices was marked by no sensational episodes save its finish. A revival of the old proposal to erect a statue of Cromwell within the Parliament precincts awoke a spirited remonstrance from Ireland. From this proposal the Government quietly withdrew. Beyond this, very little happened until, suddenly, consequent to a debate precipitated upon the supply of cordite to the army, a division disclosed the Government defeated (June 24, 1895) by a majority of seven. Thus ended a Ministry begun in compromise, continued without real coherence, and shipwrecked on the most trivial of points. Mr. McCarthy has wittily and well described this _fiasco_ as “The Cordite Explosion.”

The resignations of the Ministry followed; and Lord Rosebery was relieved from a post which could not have been agreeable to him, but in which he had probably done the best possible. “A house divided against itself--” The ensuing elections returned Lord Salisbury and the Conservatives to the control of affairs which they still retain.

This slight sketch should show that to Lord Rosebery the real moment has not yet arrived. Still comparatively a young man, and in so many ways the type of a great Liberal Peer, more than ever he is the logical leader of his party. Although that party now[D] shows signs of a disintegration probably momentary, the ebb and flow of politics are proverbial. When the tide sets the other way, it is not hazardous to predict that it will be Lord Rosebery who again commands the Liberals.

[D] January, 1899.

As a speaker, the style of Lord Rosebery will be found to be thoroughly modern,--suave, easy, and unimpassioned. In a degree denied to Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Rosebery has the gift of the phrase. The current and rather picturesque catchword, England’s “Splendid Isolation,” indeed was not his; but one example of his power to crystallize a great tendency in compact form is his reference to that wise British policy of building for the future in Africa, or whatever barbarous land. It is “Pegging out Claims for Posterity,” he says. It could hardly be more aptly turned.

LORD ROSEBERY.

THE DUTY OF PUBLIC SERVICE.

In common with some other English public men, Lord Rosebery has the art of speaking gracefully and informally on matters of public interest at occasions not political in character. Such an occasion presented itself on October 25, 1898, when, as President of the Associated Societies of the University of Edinburgh, Lord Rosebery delivered the following address. It will be found to be a good example of a style almost always at ease, yet without the sacrifice of dignity, progressing skilfully from a light attack to a serious and earnest treatment. Perhaps, indeed, the quality is more literary than oratorical.

MR. CHANCELLOR[E] AND GENTLEMEN:

I am not sure that this sumptuous Hall with which the generous Mr. M’Ewan has endowed this University is in the nature of an unmixed benefit. It makes too much of an occasion like this. To tell the truth, as I look around me and see this vast audience, I am irresistibly reminded of the most dismal moment that can occur in a man’s life,--the moment when he is about to deliver a Rectorial Address. Happily, there are one or two considerations which reassure me. One is, that the altar is already lighted for another victim, whose sacrifice, in the natural course of things, cannot long be delayed. My other comfort, sir, is that you are in the chair, because, to put it on no higher ground, the Chancellor is never present at a Rector’s Address. The same firmament cannot hold two such planets, and therefore, when I see you there, I am perfectly certain that the impression I derive from this audience is an erroneous one, and that I am not going to deliver a Rectorial Address. Well, sir, we welcome you here for every reason. We are glad to see you in your place as Chancellor. We are glad to see you on any plea in Edinburgh; and what I am happy to think of is this: that we can ensure you in that chair for the next fifty minutes what, perhaps, you can obtain nowhere else, a period of unbroken repose, untroubled by colleagues, untroubled by Cabinets, undisturbed even by boxes or telegrams; and if you, sir, will take my advice, you will take advantage of that repose. But, gentlemen, if I can explain why the Rector is not here, and why the Chancellor is, it is perhaps more difficult to explain to myself why I am here. It is partly, no doubt, because in an unwary moment I accepted this responsible office, which has such onerous duties. But it is also due to another circumstance,--that, when we were last in this Hall, you invited me, somewhat clamorously, to address you. I am a person, however, accustomed to walk in the established order of things: I could not interrupt the programme. It would neither have been _dulce_ nor _decorum_ for me to speak on that occasion. But to-night I am here to respond to that invitation. To-night, it is perhaps _decorum_ that I should speak; and if it can ever be _dulce_ to make a speech, it is _dulce_ on this occasion. But, at any rate, let us be quite clear in our understanding. I am not going to deliver a Rectorial Address--nothing so elaborate, nothing so educational. Simply, I trust, it will be a short speech on common-sense lines, and without rising to the heights of the other occasion to which I have alluded.

[E] The Right Hon. Arthur Balfour, M.P., who was in the chair.

Now, sir, with a view to the adequate performance of my functions to-night, I have been reading the address of my predecessor, our friend Professor Masson, and as I am quite sure that you have all read Professor Masson’s address too, it will not be necessary on this occasion to condescend upon details. You know more than I do about the constitution of these Societies, and you may perhaps be able--which I am not--to decide as to their relative antiquity. But there is one sinister and significant sentence in Professor Masson’s address to which I commend your attention. He says that for sixteen years the post of President was vacant, because no one could be found willing to accept the responsibility of delivering the Presidential Address. Now, if that does not move your compassion for the person who has that courage, your hearts must be harder than adamant. There is another sentence which produced a great awe and effect upon my mind. It is said that the Societies had done much good work which did not seem affected materially by the absence or the presence of their President, and as specimen of that good work he said that no less than twenty thousand essays had been delivered to the Societies in the course of their existence. Twenty thousand essays! That is a hard saying. Twenty thousand essays, blown into space! And it leads further to this appalling calculation, that if a gentleman hearing of the Associated Societies had determined to improve his mind by reading these essays, and had determined to read one every day before breakfast, it would have been sixty years before he had accomplished the task. Now, that to me, I confess, is not the precious fact in connection with these Societies. What to me is precious is this, that they garnered up so much of what is illustrious, both in regard to memories and to men in connection with Edinburgh. Take, for example, the Dialectic Society, which was founded in 1787. Well, how brilliant was Edinburgh in 1787! A race was growing up in your schools and in your universities which was destined afterwards, through the means of the _Edinburgh Review_, to influence largely both the taste and the policy of these islands. They were at that time pretty young, the most of them. Cockburn--Lord Cockburn--was being flogged every ten days at the High School, every ten days according to a minute and pathetic calculation that he has left behind him. Jeffrey--Lord Jeffrey--was at that time entering Glasgow University in his fourteenth year; and as for Lord Brougham, he was at that moment commencing a career of conflict by a struggle with a master of his class, in which, I need hardly say, Brougham came off victorious. Dugald Stewart was lecturing at that time, not merely to Edinburgh, but to the kingdom, and almost to the world at large, and Edinburgh was the centre to which all the intellect of Great Britain might, without exaggeration, be said to have gravitated. At that time the English universities were slumbering. Jeffrey had indeed taken a taste of Oxford, but liked it not. His biographer carefully says that “his College was not distinguished by study and propriety alone.” This shocked Jeffrey, and he left it. But in any case these were the golden days of Edinburgh. It was then unrivalled as an intellectual centre, unrivalled in a sense that it can never be again. Some will say that all that is gone. Well, as for the intellectual supremacy, that could not survive in the general awakening of the world. But what I also fear has gone, is the resident, inherent originality which then distinguished our city. Railways and the Press have made that impossible; for, after all, true originality can scarcely exist but in the backwaters of life. The great ocean of life smooths and rolls its pebbles to too much the same shape and texture. Those famous judges of whom we read, with something between a smile and a tear,--Braxfield and Eskgrove and Newton and Hermand,--are just as impossible in these days as the black bottles with which they stimulated their judicial attention on the bench. They are as impossible as that cry of “Gardez-loo” which meant so much to the passer-by on the streets. Well, after all, we must take the rough with the smooth, and the good with the bad. “Gardez-loo” itself was only the symbol of hideous physical impurities, which we none of us should regret; and perhaps even some of those social glories, over which we are so accustomed to gloat in the past, might not have been entirely agreeable had we to realize them in the present. Take these old judges whom I mentioned. They are very picturesque and interesting figures; but I am not sure that any of us could have faced them in the character of a defendant or an accused person without a qualm, more especially if we were opposed to them in politics, and even--if tradition lies not--even if we were their opponents at chess. And if we were in that unfortunate and perhaps discreditable position, we should go and seek our legal adviser, not, as now, in the decorous recesses of Queen Street or of George Street, but, as Colonel Mannering went to seek him, at Clerihugh’s, enjoying “high jinks” in the midst of a carousal, from which he could hardly tear himself for matters of the most vital import to his client.

Well, of course it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of His Time”--and I hope that you all do read it, and read it at least once a year, because no resident of Edinburgh can properly enjoy his city without reading Lord Cockburn once a year--it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn without seeing that he was an optimist. But even he says of the Edinburgh of his time--which he says was so unrivalled--even he describes it as “always thirsty and unwashed.” Well, I am not quite sure when I read that description if we should have thought the Edinburgh of 1787 as delightful as he did. I hardly venture to risk myself in this line of conjecture. Should we all have appreciated Jeffrey as much as he did? That must remain in the realms of the unknowable and the unknown. But there is worse behind. There is even treason talked about the divine Sir Walter Scott. In that very delightful book which furnishes so much leisurely reading for the Scotsman or the Scotswoman, or for anybody,--I mean “Memoirs of a Highland Lady,”--I came upon this sentence, which I have never since been able to digest. It says about Sir Walter Scott, “He went out very little,” and, when he did go, that “he was not an agreeable gentleman, sitting very silent, looking dull and listless unless an occasional flash lit up his countenance. It was odd, but Sir Walter never had the reputation in Edinburgh that he had elsewhere.” Gentlemen, I veil my face; I cannot get over that, till I remember that a prophet is never a prophet in his own country, and there may have been people, even in Edinburgh, who did not think of Sir Walter as we do. But I do not mention all these disagreeable considerations as sheer iconoclasm and blasphemy. No, gentlemen, it is in a very different spirit that I lay them before you. I lay them before you as with a sort of inward groan. They are to me a sort of philosophic potsherd with which I scrape myself. It is in the attempt to comfort myself for living in the Edinburgh of the end of the nineteenth century, and not in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth or the seventeenth or the sixteenth centuries, that thus I endeavor to recall these things, and console myself anew.

Well, I think then there are some circumstances which we should bear in mind before we give way to the wish to exchange new Edinburgh for old Edinburgh. At any rate, there are some circumstances that should discount our enthusiasm. But, indeed, in any case it would not be possible for us of the Associated Societies to concentrate all our interest in Edinburgh as our forefathers did. In the first place, our students, our members, are by no means all Scotsmen. They come from England, and from all over the world. They come here, many of them, to learn arts which they mean to practise and to exercise elsewhere, so that it would be impossible for them to remain in Edinburgh; if they did, indeed, I think that some professions in Edinburgh would be somewhat glutted and overstocked. But, in the second place, there is the railroad, which equally prevents it--the railroad, which has so profoundly stirred up our people, which has so inspired them with the fever of travel, makes concentration in our old capital impossible. By thousands are the strangers that it brings in and takes out of Edinburgh every day, and indeed, as regards its effect on our town, it is something like that of the pipes which convey the water of some hushed and inland loch away to the boisterous strife of cities, and again away from the cities to the eternal ocean. The students of that Edinburgh which was once so difficult to reach and to leave are now whirled away into a thousand whirlpools of civilization; they can no longer huddle around and try to blow up the embers of that ancient Edinburgh which we can only revive in imagination. But of Edinburgh as it exists--the historical, the beautiful, the inspiring--I trust they have taken and are taking a deep draught and a long memory. They are here at the most critical and the most fruitful period of their lives; and sure am I that, whether they wish it or not, they will bear away from this place a seal and a mark and a stamp which can leave them only with life itself.

But, gentlemen, I go a little further in this sense, and I believe that even if the students could remain in Edinburgh and concentrate themselves here, it would be bad for Edinburgh and bad for Scotland, but bad also for the Empire. We in Scotland wish to continue to mould the Empire as we have in the past--and we have not moulded it by stopping at home. Your venerable Principal is an instance in point. And we have even a nearer object-lesson in two returning Viceroys from Canada and from India: Aberdeen--from Canada, where he is by and by to be replaced by a Minto; and Elgin--the second Elgin--from India. Well, I say then that it is not the Edinburgh of Cockburn alone that I wish you to bear in your thoughts to-night, but rather the Edinburgh which has dispersed her sons all over the Empire, the assiduous mother and foster-mother of the builders of our Empire. From the time of Dundas, who almost populated India with Scotsmen, that has always been the function of Scotland; and I look, then, to my colleagues of the Associated Societies not merely as going forth to their several professions and callings in life, but as going forth as potential empire-builders, or at least as empire-maintainers.