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Canadian Club Address. Victoria, August 1936.

Contrasted Great Men.

One of the privileges of a Governor-General, in which there
is no limit to his activities, is the study of his fellow men. It is
my good fortune to have to meet daily men of every profession and of
every type of mind and temperament. These pleasant social duties incline
one to reminiscence and to memories of friends in the past, and
they make one reflect, too, upon certain broad contrasts among human
beings. I thought perhaps I might occupy a few minutes of my time by
giving you my recollections of one or two great men whom I have had
the privilege to know, and whose minds stood in strong contrast, since
they formed, so to speak, expositions in large type, of contrasts
which, in smaller type, you and I find in our everyday life.

I have been exceptionally lucky. In my youth at Glasgow
University and at Oxford I had famous teachers, men like Edward Caird
and Gilbert Murray and Henry Jones. When I went to the Bar I was a
pupil of that great lawyer, John Andrew Hamilton, whose judgments,
when he became Lord Sumner, will be familiar to every lawyer here,
and I had the task of "devilling", as we say, for some time for Sir
Robert Finlay when he was Attorney-General, and who afterwards became
Lord Chancellor of England. When I went to South Africa I saw something
of Cecil Rhodes in his last months of life, and I served for
three years under Lord Milner. I knew Lord Roberts and I knew Lord
Kitchener, and all my life I was a friend of Douglas Haig. In my incursions
into journalism I had the good fortune to act as assistant
editor of "The Spectator" with St. Loe Strachey, who was one of the