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St. Andrews Day. Winnipeg. 1936.

I am honoured to be here tonight as the guest of this Society, and to be entrusted with the toast of this day, and all the memories which it evokes. In most of the British Dominions the St. Andrews Day banquet is the most important function of the year, for, like the Guildhall banquet in London, it is the occasion on which statesmen declare their policy. Here in Canada it has a special meaning. It is the praiseworthy custom of our race, by whatever waters of Babylon their tents may be pitched, to form a Society to remind them of the rock whence they were hewn. But I doubt if the Red river and the Assiniboine can be called the waters of Babylon, for Canada, in one sense, is simply Scotland writ large. Since I came here a year ago I have never suffered for one moment from homesickness. I find pine forests and swift streams, and trout, and salmon, and mountains which are Scotland on a grander scale; and I find in parts of the Prairies green rolling hills like my own Borders. I find everywhere often men and women of Scots descent who still, after several generations, often retain the soft Highland voice or the broad Lowland speech. I have now been a good deal up and down Canada, and everywhere I go I am greeted by the sound of the pipes. You need only the heather and a Scots mist to make the resemblance complete.

Nevertheless tonight I am addressing a gathering of exiles - contented exiles - and some whose exile now dates back over many generations; but exiles all the same. For any man who has Scottish blood in his veins is an exile away from Scotland. Now, in a sense it is the genius of the Scot to be an exile. He is extraordinarily good at pitching his tent in faraway places and prospering. But he always keeps one eye and a considerable part of his mind on the lit-

The responsibilities of Scottish Blood.

A. My father used to tell how, as a very young man, he wandered into a religious meeting where, bench by bench, people were confessing their sins. At last it came to the turn of an old Scotsman with a shaven upper lip and a beard under his chin. He rose and declared that he had been deeply interested in what he had heard, and that he would only have been too glad himself to oblige in the same way. "But," he added, "honesty compels me to admit that my own life for the past three years has been, humanly speaking, pairfect." We are all apt sometimes to claim - humanly speaking - perfection.

B. During the debates in the Presbyterys before Church union in Scotland came about there was one elder who finally withdrew his opposition in these words:- "I think the scheme of union is impracticable, ill-considered, unjust, and indeed absolutely idiotic - but there is no doubt it is God' s will."

C. There was an old shoemaker in Fife who when in theological argument was confronted with a quotation from the Apostle Paul used to declare that that was just where he and Paul differed.

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tle country he has left. That is the one secret of the power of the Scot. No people, I think, since the Ancient Greeks has been at once so tenacious of memories and loyalties, and at the same time so readily adaptable to new conditions, Nothing is too strange, nothing is too formidable, if you can link it up with what you know and love.

Sometimes, in moments of despondency, I have a notion that Scotland is changing, that Scotsmen are changing, that the Scotland of today is very different from the country I knew when I was a boy. That, I suppose, is a malady which attacks every conservative soul as he watches the processes of time. But I comfort myself with the reflection that there are certain things in our race which can never change. We may cease to be Bible-reading and God-fearing; we may cease to be logical; we may even cease, by a fortunate dispensation, to be drouthy; but two things we will always be: far-wandering and clannish. I do not think that any process of evolution will expel from our blood the old instinct for adventure and enterprise. We shall always be like saul looking for his father's asses with half a hope that he may find a kingdom. And I think that we shall always be clannish. We shall always cherish that warm and intimate sense of kinship which is our peculiar glory.

There are many things to be said against us - how many only a Scotsman knows. We are sometimes a little too proud of our own things merely because they are our own. And I am afraid we may also be charged sometimes with being too well satisfied, not only with our own things, but with ourselves. (My father's story).

But, gentlemen, having conceded so much to the Devil's advocate, I am not

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prepared to concede any more. It is a high privilege to have Scottish blood, but it is a privilege which involves a heavy responsibility, for we have a reputation to keep up. Partly it is an absurd reputation. We are supposed to be dour and hard; that may be so; but we are also exceedingly sentimental. We are supposed to be careful about money. No doubt we are. But in any case which touches our heart or imagination we can be almost crazily generous. We are pragmatists and realists and critical of folly; but we are also dreamers. We are a reverent people, and yet we can be exceedingly free with our sacred things, as anyone who has read half a dozen Covenanting sermons will admit. Church Union story). Even in our most serious and solemn moods we have touches of comedy. We are a law-abiding people, because we know the value of law and order, and yet there is no race in the world which has so little real respect for constituted authorities. We accept them as an inevitable convention, but we refuse to do more than that. We are free thinkers in the best sense of the word. I (Paul story). What the Scotsman is, only the Scotsman knows, and he will not tell. If I had to take a type of our countrymen I would take someone like Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy, a respectable Glasgow merchant, very keen on business and very careful about the pennies; but ready to make a wild journey at the call of friendship, and capable, at the clachan of Aberfoyle, of seizing the red-hot coulter of a plough and turning it on the Highland cateran.

The privilege of our blood, as I have said, carries with it its duties. Sir Walter Scott, once said of somebody - I think it was Lord Jeffrey - that he had "lost the broad Scots and won only the narrow English." Now there is such a thing as the narrow Scots, and that is

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every bit as bad as the narrow English. We are a people with a rich and varied history - a strong people made up of many diverse types - with a generous tradition behind us containing many things which dull folk consider contradictions. We have quixotry in our blood as well as prudence; poetry as well as prose. The man who tries to whittle down our heritage, to narrow our tradition, to select capriciously from our national life, is no lover of the broad Scots. We have a tradition to preserve, the full tradition. That is the first of our responsibilities.

We have also a duty ·to the home of those traditions - our birthplace or the birthplace of our fathers. I want to see Scotsmen all over the world maintaining a lively interest in Scotland. I do not want men of our race merely to be distinguished up and down the face of the earth; I want Scotland herself, the home of our race, to be healthy and prosperous and to retain its historic national character. There are many things amiss in Scotland today. We are losing some of the best of our people. We are losing especially some of the best of our rural stocks. I know glens in the Borders which, in my childhood, had half a dozen chimneys smoking, while today the only inhabitants are a shepherd and his dog. Some of our institutions seem to be decaying. The Scottish Bar is not what it was. The Scottish Church, perhaps, has not its old hold over the people. Our ancient idiomatic system of education is changing, perhaps not for the better. Too many Scottish industries are controlled from outside. Our old habits, our old tastes are changing, and, to take one instance, the Scottish vernacular is no longer spoken by us as our fathers spoke it.

Some of these changes are inevitable, but many are not. We