BURNS CLUB CONCERT

Otago Witness, Issue 3594, 30 January 1923, Page 66

BURNS CLUB CONCERT

His Majesty’s Theatre was crowded to the doors on the 23rd on the occasion of the Burns anniversary concert. Mr J. Wallace occupied the chair, and after the singing of the National Anthem and the playing of some Scottish airs by the Dunedin Highland Pipe Band, he briefly addressed the audience. He said that the large attendance that night was most gratifying to the club, even allowing that theirs was a Scotch community. He was pleased to announce that they ha>l the Chatham Islands school children with them that night—(applause) —and he had also to announce that for the second year an anony mous donor had forwarded them a haggis. As-they saw he had it cm the table in front of him, and pieces of the pudding would be given to members of the audience who desired to try it at the conclusion of the concert. —(Applause.) He had to apologise for the absence of their president (Mr Dugald Paterson), who had gone jto_ Auckland in connection with the contest for the Sanders Cup. Mr Wallace said that the reason they were holding the concert that night instead of the 25th was because they knew they would have a very large attendance, and they were unable to get the theatre for the concert date of the anniversary. The other speaker was Miss Mary H. M. King M.A., principal of the Otago Girls’ High’ School. - Miss King gave a ffighly interesting and thoughtful address, taking as her subject “Burns and Democracy.” She said it was something like a century arid a quarter since Burns had died—at a date when New Zealand had been scarcely heard of. Great as his friends knew him to be, great as Scotland recognised him to be, great as he in his decline knew himself to be—for all true greatness knew itself—it was hardly realised that in lands yet unborn, so to speak, this fame would be celebrated as they were celebrating it that night.—(Applause.) Happy was the race for whom a great poet had spoken, whose lives and aspirations he had voiced, as Burns had done for Scotland. But Burns had done more than write of the fields and skies, the daisies and the mice in the fields —he stood as the poet of democracy —of humanity. He sang not ordy the songs of Scotland, but of humanity. “‘The rank is but the guinea stamp—the man’s a man for a’ that.”—(Applause.) The speaker continued that Builis’s career was not. a U that it might have been. When they looked at the great powers of the man- -wnen they saw him standing head and shoulders above other men—they expected greater things perhaps than they found A great countryman had stated that the fault lay in the fact that Burns had never truly learned to follow the highest in his own nature, and in that lesson there was a great lesson m the' democracy for which he stood- A greater poet than Burns Hhd said that if a man would write an heroic poem he must first make his life an heroic poem, and that Burns had failed to do. But Burns’s spirit still lived, and that part of him which in his own life had failed to realise survived as an inspiration to them. —(Ap- % plause.) An excellent concert programme was submitted, and every item was encored