2110-19-3-5

Upper Canada College, Toronto. Jan. 22 '36

I am very glad to have the privilege of being here with you tonight for I feel that I have many links with this school. Its former Principal, for whom I had a profound respect, overlapped with me at Oxford, and from him I first learned something about this land of yours. My partner in business for nearly a quarter of a century was the son of George Brown, one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, and was educated here. So was Sir Edward Peacock, who has long been my friend, and who today holds a position second to none in the City of London. So you see that my ties with Upper Canada College go a long way back, and it is a real pleasure for me to make the personal acquaintance of an institution of which I have heard so much, and which has for so lohg been a major force among the youth of this country.

Mr. MacDermot tells me that I ought to say something to you tonight in addition to thanking you for your welcome. Well, we are all bound together by one common interest - you as the alumni of a famous school, and I as one who all my life has been interested in education. But I am not going to talk to you about education in the ordinary sense. I would rather say a word to you about the times in which we live and the special duties which they lay upon those of us who venture to call ourselves educated men and women.

I do not know if you have read a book by the American Secretary for Agriculture, Mr. Henry Wallace. It is called New Frontiers, and is one of hte most thought-provoking pieces of writing which I have read for many a day. The gist of its argument is that the United States have no longer a physical frontier which permits of

2.

indefinite expansion. Their borders are closed and the true frontier now is a spiritual one. He urges his countrymen to push beyond the old narrow limits to a new and more fruitful world of thought. That seems to me a truth which ap lies to all the world. Here in Canada we are still fortunate enough to have a physical frontier. for there are still great tracts of our land which await actual exploration, great natural riches which are still unassessed and undeveloped. A physical frontier is a tremendous asset for any nation, but still more important is the spiritual frontier of which Mr. Wallace has written, and it is on that that I would offer you a few observations this evening.

I had the good fortune to be born a Scottish Borderer. In the old days dwellers on a border had to be a tough lot to survive. As the phrase goes, "The hand had to keep the head", for every day they were looking across the marches to the land of their ancestral enemies. These times have long gone, but I think that something remains in the atmosphere of a borderland which marks it out from other places. History is closer to us; its monuments are more visible; there is a sharper tang of romance in the air.

Now today we are all dwellers upon a Border. We are all, in a sense, Wardens of the Marches. The civilisaiton, which we once thought was so impregnable and secure, we know today to be not in itself a stable thing, a gift from the gods, but a thing which has to be fought for and jealously guarded. All our idols are rattling in their niches, and we are not inclined to look at htem with such respectful eyes. We are faced with problems so vast, so novel, and

3.

so intricate that they cannot be settled by any of the old maxims. It is a difficult time for elderly people who are set in their ways. It is a horrible time for dogmatists. It is a disquieting time for the timid. But it is a magnificent time in which to be young. I do not think that in any period of our history there have been such chances for youth, so much work to be done which only the spirit of youth can accomplish, such wide horizons for youth to travel to.

Let me suggest for a few of the duties which living upon a frontier involves.

The first is that we must revise our dogmas. We must rethink think our creeds and make them fit the new conditions. We must maintain a receptive mind and be sympathetic to new ideas. We must preserve a critical and questioning attitude of mind which refuses to take things on hearsay and insists on making certain of the truth that is in us. If society is to be kept secure and firm against sceptical doubts, those who serve it must themselves have been seeptics and have raised the doubts and answered them. We must not be like Scott's Old Mortality, only cutting the inscriptions deeper on tombstones. No doubt there are eternal truths, but not very many, and even these require a frequent re-statement. So many of our rules of life are not eternal truths, but only working conventions, that they must occasionally have a spring-cleaning to make certain that they have not survived their usefulness.

It is here that the value of education is most apparent. The untrained mind is apt either to stick stubbornly in the old grooves, or else to be a thing blown about by every wind of doctrine ,

4.

clutching at any novelty merely because it is a novelty. There are people today who seem to think that the word "modern" is descriptive of final values, whereas it only implies an historical judgment. "Modern" means only that a thing belongs to our own day. It may be good, but it is not necessarily good, for we are not wiser than our fathers. The educated mind has another safeguard, for it knows something of the past and it realises that many of the things which masquerade as novelties are fallacies as old as the hills. There has never been a time, I think, when so many ancient heresies have been resurrected and propounded as new revelations. (Capercailzie stor ).

There is a second duty, which is more of a moral duty. Dwellers on a frontier dare not be selfish or they will defeat their purpose. They must be of the spending type, conscious of their obligations to their community, conscious that their own interests can never be fully realised except in the promotion of the communal interest, that they are bound one to another in a disciplined service. Borderers are always clannish in the best sense; they realise the importance of the community as against the individual interest, for otherwise they could not exist. Now that is the foundation of that fine character which we call the gentleman. It is the boast at home of our great schools that they produce gentlemen, or at least they try to. The word has many unpleasant connotations, but properly interpreted it is a great ideal, and it still remains one of the principal aims of true education. I should go further and say it is the business of all our schools to produce not only gentlemen but aristocrats. But I must define an aristocrat in my own way. An aristocrate is a man who gives

5.

more to the world than he takes from it.

Lastly there is another moral quality which we dwellers on a frontier must cherish, and I cannot define it better than by calling it the sportsmanlike spirit. The sportsmanlike spirit means taking risks in life, playing the long game and not the short game. There is no worse motto for youth, or for age, than "safety first". If you go to Washington today you will see, across the river Potomac from the Lincoln memorial, on the Virginia shore the white manor house of Arlington that was the home of Robert Lee, the great opponent of Lincoln one of the half-dozen greatest soldiers to my mind, in the history of war. He was offered the Commandership-in-chief of the army of the United States; but Virginia joined the South and he felt himself bound to fling in his fortunes with his own State. You know the result. More than once he was within sight of victory. Inferior in numbers, terribly inferior in munitions and supplies, for four years he led his ragged armies to the supremest heights of achievement; and, when he failed, he devoted his remaining years to healing the wounds of the nation. If you go to the old church of St. Paul's in Richmond, Virginia, you will see a memorial window to Lee with these words, "By faith Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God ." There is a constant temptation, not only for a nation, but for every one of us, to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. Egypt is the land of the soft option and the short game. It is the land that offers every temptation to those who think of the price and not of the value of things - Egypt, with its wealth, its science and its luxury. But the sportsmanlike way, and in the long run the wiser way, is to join the shabby little people who are