2110-19-5-10

Toronto University

I have been honoured today by a great University, which is the centre of light and learning in a great city. It would be an impertinence for me to attempt to praise you. Your achievements in science and scholarship have long since made you a familar name in the world. But your most recent graduate may be permitted to offer you his heartfelt thanks for the honour you have paid him, his congratulations on the great things you have done in the past, and his hope, nay, his certainty, of the brilliant career which still awaits you.

It is my duty, I understand, to say a few words to you this afternoon. I am glad to have the privilege, for I am always happy to have the chance of speaking to young men. All my life I have been connected with Universities, and, indeed, until the other day, I represented my own Scottish Universities in the British Parliament. But it is not easy for me to find a topic. Politics, of some kind or other, have hitherto been my chief subject; but politics now, I am glad to say - at least politics in the ordinary sense - are forbidden me. But today, when the duties and rights of the State impinge so much upon the private life of the citizen, politics, in the broadest sense, have become of far more universal interest than ever before. We realise that no nation can live for itself alone. We recognize that all of us are members of a community, whether it be city or nation, and that the individual's life can never again be an enclave secluded from his fellows. The public interest has become, in some sense, also every man's private interest. So I hope that I may be permitted to speak

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to you for a few minutes upon a topic which is partly political, but which is also most germane to a University, and to the future of your young men whom I see before me.

My old friend, James Bryce, when he was British Ambassador at Washington, spoke thus of the Universities in the United States. "Whereas," he said, "the Universities of Germany are popular, but are not free, and those of England are free, but not popular, yours, like those of Scotland, are both popular and free." Popular and free ! - that is a great inception, and it is a creation which I think the University of Toronto has striven to live up to. The two words do not mean the same thing. An institution may be popular without freedom, and free without being popular. The combination, if it is achieved, means the attainment of the true democratic ideal, as I understand it - equality of social status, a high level of human sympathy, and conflict freedom of thought.

We are told, and told truly, that today democracy is at stake. I do not know how to define the word. Lord Acton once counted over two hundred definitions of ' liberty', and I think it would be possible for a laborious scholar to get as many definitions of "democracy". Primarily, of course, it is a particuar mechanism of government. Now, no system of government has any sacrosanctity in itself; its value depends entirely upon how it is worked, and upon whether the conditions are suitable. The democratic form of government is the most difficult of all, because it sets before itself so high a purpose. It offers a wonderful prospect, and if it fails the illusion is the keener. You remember that Herodotus lyric-

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cally talks about democracy as being a thing which is beautiful even in its name. And yet~the generation after him was utterly disillusioned, and you find a Greek statesman dismissing it contemputously as an acknowledged absurdity. The true democratic ideal has never been attained in histoy, and today the conditions of its attainment are more difficult than ever before.

But I am not going to talk to you about the political side. The democratic ideal has a far wider application than the mere techniqu of government. I can imagine a country with a full representative institution, with all the apparatus of freedom, where, nevertheless, the citizens lived in, spiritual bondage. And history has many examples to show of men dwell under the harshest tyranny, who have yet preserved their freedom of soul. Popular forms of government have no value unless they foster in each individual the power of being himself, standing squarely on his feet, and of living his life according to law which is self-imposed, because it is willingly accepted. Let us consider for a minute or two the meaning of this spiritual tendency, without which no constitution, however liberal in form, is more than a tyranny and a bondage.

It means, if I may risk a definition, the safeguarding of the personality. Coming from England a month ago, we had a rather stormy and comfortless voyage, and I was reduced to the reading of St. Augustine. One phrase of that great man stuck in my memory, where he talks about "the abyssmal depths of personality" - abyssus humanae conscientae. It is the human soul which today is in danger;

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its integrity and independence.vOur fathers devised a certain constitutional machine which they believed would safeguard this independence, and at the same time permit the tasks of government to be adequately performed. That machine may have been too narrowly constructed; in the interests of efficiency it may have to be drastically remodelled, for, as I have said, there is no plenary virtue in any one device. But what we must hold fast to is the truth that no machine can be permitted to impair the freedom of the spirit and weaken the citizen's responsibility towards that conscience and that reason which are the gifts of God.

The danger, as I see it, comes from two sources. One I should call the peril of mass. In our modern state, with its vast aggregations of human beings, we are apt to think too abstractly. Phrases like "the workers", "the proletariat", "the bourgeoisie", obscure reason. Instead of a number of living, breathing, thinking, suffering individuals, we think only of broad classes, and generalise about them with a fatal facility. It is due partly to a false scientific standpoint, which likes to deal with human nature in the lump. It is a dangerous tendency, for the result is that the State is apt to be thought of as an end in itself, and not as something which exists for the betterment of the individuel citizen. The human being is obscured by the inhuman mass. I am no believer in a narrow individualism. The State, the organised community, is a thing of immense value - it is indeed the basis of civilisation, and there are a thousand directions in which communal powers may be rightly used, since they have a weight behind them denied to sporadic individual

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effort. But these powers are of value only in so far as they safeguard and fulfill the life of eaeh citizen, and give to him or her a richer, more responsible, and, therefore, a freer life .

The second danger is what I would call the peril of the Machine. This tends not merely to blur the individuality of the human masses, but to leave out humanity altogether, and to regard the citizen as a minute cog in a vast impersonal mechanic. Efficiency is the watchword. The individual is squeezed and planed into a lifeless automaton. But efficiency has no meaning for the State, except in so far as it fosters human values. Otherwise we have a sterile conception of society where human values disappear altogether.

These dangers are incident to what we are accustomed to call civilisation. They are attended, no doubt, by an enormous increase in the material apparatus of life; but at the same time they nullify all that makes life worth living, and in the long run they must mean the disintegration of society. For, just as you cannot have a healthy League of Nations without healthy nations, so you cannot have a wholesome society unless the units in it have a wholesome mode of life. The League are increased by something with which we have been too familiar in recent years throughout the world, and which is best described, I think , as a failure of nerve. There is panic abroad, and people run to any shelter from the storm. Certain great countries in the Old World have been prepared to surrender their souls to a dictator or an oligarchy, if only they are promised security. In such cases, all freedom of personality is lost, and human beings become a disciplined collection of automata.