Mr. Baldwin and the Scot

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 166, 10 April 1926, Page 15

Mr. Baldwin and the Scot

The British Prime Minister presided recently at the 261st anniversary festival of the , R °y al Scottish Corporation, which dates back to the days when Scots came to London in the footsteps of James VI., and exists for the purpose of relieving the aged and necessitous Scottish poor in the Greater London area.

IN proposing the toast .of the Corporation, Mr. Baldwin said“l should like, if I may as an Englishman, not without connection with a certain part of Scotland, to offer a few observations on the virtue of the Scot, 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, to my mind at least, in considering the character of the Scot, that fills me with more admiration than the way in which your people for generations have held up the satndard of plain living and high thinking a lesson which to-day in a world that, if it could, would be a world of high living and plain thinking, is needed more than it ever was needed before.” (Cheers.)

“Nothing has made Scotland —and I am speaking as an outsider—more than that magnificent system of parochial education which she had for years before any other part of the British Isles. The picture of th? Scottish student, with his sack of oatmeal, leaving his work for part of the year, living hard, and drawing on the frugality and the selfsacrifice of father, and mother, and brother, and sister, in the pursuit and the attainment of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. is an example to the whole world.” (Cheers.)

“And what you Scots have to be mindful of is this: That in this age, when education, as everything else, is served up spoonfed and like pap. you do not allow yourselves to lose sight of the ideals of the past generation, and see that your people do not, because of desirable things placed at their doors, and far easier of attainment than they' were to their parents- -that these people do not on that account neglect and despise it. And when I think of those lessons which you have to give us, I am always struck by the fact that of Scotsmen—l think perhaps alone—the English people arc in nowise either jealous or envious. “Whatever be the reason, the English have always taken the Scots to their hearts as blood brothers.” (Cheers.) “I do not think it is difficult to give a 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 that Union itself afforded no stimulus, whatever else it may have done, to Scottish literatuie. "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.’ But when David Hume and Adam Smith came, they were still drawing, as many Scots had done, 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.” (Cheers.) “You had, as no other nation ever has had, a man of yourselves to interpret you

to the neighbouring kingdom. That was Walter Scott. Because, however hardened an admirer of Burns you may be, no one could call Burns an interpreter to an Englishman.” (Laughter.) “I cannot think of any country which, in words that I may quote, had its past and its present, its Highland and its Lowland, its peasants and its citizens, its heroes and its martyrs—the very stuff of it people and the genius of its soil recorded with the power and the vitality, and the humour, and the humanity with which it was recorded by Scott. But greatest service rendered by Scott was, as I have said before, the interpretation of Scotland to England. “Take myself as a typical Englishman. By the time I was ten I had read ‘The Talcs of a Grandfather,’ I had read all his poems, I had read half his novels. Since then, I suppose, no year goes by when I do not read some of them. W hencver I go to Edinburgh I go down Castle Street and look at the bay window where he stood, and the door where he

welcomed Pet Marjorie. “Had there been a Walter Scott for Ireland there would have been no Boundary Commission sitting to-day”— (Hear, hear), “and I should have been able to have devoted my week-end, as I had intended, to prepare a speech worthy of this occasion.” (Laughtr.) “And 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 any one 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.” (Laughter.) “That a genius had arisen, under the spell of whose wand the Lowland would adopt the garb of the robbers of the North.” (Laughter.) “If it had not been for Walter Scott you would not have seen the kilt south of the Grampians, and the result of it is that we English, a prosaic race in many respects, cannot look to-day at Scotland, or at a Scot, except through those glasses tinted with romance and with history—those glasses that Walter Scott made us wear. And while we arc looking at you with the visions of the Wizard of the North, wrapt in admiration, you attend strictly to business. "Perhaps if I were asked what represents the soul of Scotland, I could not answer better than in a reply which I have quoted before, and which was given many, many years ago to a relative of mine in New Zealand by an old Scottish farmer. And, as you know, the cream of New Zealand is the Scot. . . "My relative asked him: ‘How long do 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. ‘That is the sustenance for body, and the sustenance for the spirit, and may they abide for ever.”