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Opening of Women's College Hospital. Toronto. 22nd Feb, 1936

22nd January, 1936.

I am very proud that you have permitted me to be present
at the inauguration of the new Women's College Hospital. I remember
when I was a very small boy, being taken by my father to the opening
of a new hospital in Glasgow. It was opened by the Duke of Argyll,
who was then a very old man, who had been a member of Gladstone's
Cabinet. One thing he said that has always stuck in my memory. He
said that he had often heard clever people discuss the proper definition
of civilisation, and that he had never heard a satisfactory
answer. But he said that he felt, looking around that hospital and
realising all that it meant to human life and happiness, the best
answer you could gtve would be that this was civilisation.

Here, in this great effort to relieve pain and suffering,
you have a particular contribution to civilisation. It is the work
of women; it is a hospital for women, administered by women. In my
extreme youth, when I was with Lord Milner in South Africa, I was
put in charge of what we called the Concentration Camps - the camps
into which the Boer women and children were collected from the areas
devastated by war. It was a strange and feverish time, and I had
to learn a lot of things which do not usually come within a young
man's sphere of knowledge. Two things I learned which I have never
forgotten. One was the unassessable value of the hard and self-
sacrificing work of doctors and nurses, for we turned these camps
in six months from a Lazar house into a health resort. The other
was the unassessable value of women's work, for it was the Ladies'
Commission, under my old friend Dame Millicent Fawcett, which enabled
us to turn the tide. Ever since then I have been a staunch