A Meeting and a Moral

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 103, 25 January 1930, Page 19

A Meeting and a Moral

Speaking at the recent dinner of the Royal Society of Medicine (says Public Opinion ), Mr. Ramsay MacDonald told a story which speakers, when pointing out to young people the opportunities that life offers, can repeat with effect.

T was the first time in my life I bad been to Buckingham Palace,” y Mr. MacDonald said, "and as the great ones of this earth passed in g their dazzling and gorgeous uniforms, a man of peculiarly striking H distinction appeared and I asked who he was. I was told he was Lord Dawson. His dignity seemed to indicate that he had been born there. After the feast was over this man in an extraordinarily familiar sort of way held out his hand, and asked: ‘Have you forgotten me?’ “When I told him that I did not think we had ever met before, he reminded me that under this great cloak of dignity, title, and circumstance was a man whom I once knew as a medical student. The last time we had met befo ;e that occasion we had issued into Gower Street towards midnight after a “most respectable Supper. We were going the same way up to the north (f London.

“Looking at each other, he said to me,.‘How much have you got?’ I, hat ing taken a hurried glance at a few odd coppers, said to him, ‘How much have you?’ Our combined wealth was insufficient to save us from walking from the south end of Gower Street up to Holloway Station after midnight.

“After all your skill and all your forethought and all your capacity to forecast what is going to happen, if you had been a third that night, over forty years ago, could you, whatever your condition, have said to both of us, ‘Gentlemen, you will bid each other good-night to-night at the corner of Holloway Station, and it will be your fate not to meet again until you are invited as guests of His Majesty to partake of his hospitality at Buckingham Palace?’ ” 1

“The Prime Minister did not go on,” comments the “Evening Standard” "as he might have done, to draw the ’moral of this really remarkable reminiscence—that there is much to be said for the social system in which such a thing can happen.

“Perhaps we have not realised to the full the ideal of the career open to the talents.’ But it would be hard to name any country in any period of history which has come closer to it. Closer, certainly, than was France when the phrase was first invented, for careers were then open only to those whoso talents, were recognised as such by the Emperor. “Even in England to-day, of course, it may be an advantage to be born as a member of a rich or family. But it may not be, and what is really important in this connection, ibis by no means necessary The road of education to its very end has been thrown open to persons of the humblest origins. “The slum-bred child who shows signs of brains at his elementary school may go thence by way of a secondary school to one of the older Universities, where all the honours and all the prizes and all the oppor unities of later life lie ready to his hands. He may pass into the CivlService and become Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, or he may be called to the Bar and become Lord Chancellor. No profession, except perhaps the Army and the Navy, now presents any insuperable obstacles to the entrance of a young man who seems likely to excel in it.

“To most observers this widespread scattering of opportunity will seem the most precious gift of our modern civilisation. The adventure of 1 has been thrown open to all, but'it remains an adventure, has been render 1, indeed, even more adventurous than it was, since the well-born young man of promise fihds, as his grandfather did not, the son of the dustman m the field against him and no less well-equipped than he.

“Entrants for the great race are drawn from the whole population, and no accident of birth any longer prevents one competitor from starting or absolves another from the necessity of running his fastest.