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The Durham Dinner. Toronto, 1938.

I am glad to have the privilege of being here to-night.
I am always happy at a dinner of members of my old profession, a
profession with which, as an honorary Bencher of Osgoode Hall, I am
proud to have a Canadian connection. [ST: hand written insert not legible]. This is not an ordinary annual
dinner of the club, for its purpose is to commemorate what happened
a hundred years ago, an event which is one of the most memorable in
the story of the British Empire. The year 1838 saw the issue of
Lord Durham's report.

The toast with which I am entrusted tonight
is the memory of Lord Durham. He died within two years of his return
to England, disappointed, misunderstood, bitterly criticised 1
his brief career having closed in apparent failure. But his dying
words were "Canada will some day do justice to my memory'', and the
family motto of the Lambtons was "Le jour viendra". That day has
come. The world has tong ago done ample justice to his work and he
stands high on the roll of the makers of our Canadian nation.

A century is a long time, but till the other day there
were men alive who had seen him. Lord Strathcona whom I knew, and
whom many here must remember well 1 as a young man of twenty saw Durham,
and was reprimanded for omitting to remove his hat! What manner
of man was this English peer, whose dark, eager, melancholy face
looks down on us in our dining-room at Rideau Hall from the canvas of
Sir Thomas Lawrence? In the first place he was that not uncommon
type, the Radical aristocrat. The nobleman with popular sympathies
is apt to cut a slightly ridiculous figure, like the Jacobinical ci-devants
of the French Revolution, or a virtuous character out of Sandford