2110-19-9-2

Yale University. 22nd June, 1938.

You have done me a great honour today in admitting me into your fellowship and I can only offer you my sincere gratitude. This week I have returned to the habits of the Scottish Borderers, my ancestors, for I have made a raid from the north across the border, and I am returning not empty-handed. I fear that when my forebears v isited England in the old days they were not welcomed. If they were caught they were hanged. But you have received this raider with the warmth and graciousness of the most hospitable nation on earth.

I am happy to be present at this gathering of the alumni of Yale, for it is the best kind of company - a meeting of different generations and every profession, bound together by an ancient loyalty. The assembling together of humanity has always been a little suspect. Political gatherings are apt to be noisy and mendacious. Do you remember an ominous sentence of Adam Smith where he says that any gathering of people of the same profession, especially lawyers, usually ends in a conspiracy against the public. We do not know what doctors plot at their dark conventicles. As for the clergy, I remember, when I was Lord High Commission to the Church of Scotland in Edinurgh, that at the General Assembly a Highland minister, paying his first visit, rose and expressed his disappointment. His clerical brethren, he said, seemed to him to be not unlike manure, which, he added, if distrituted over a ride area was harmless and indeed beneficial, but when brought together into one place was somewhat nauseous. But no one can have a word to say against the coming to-

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gether of the children of a great university to express their loyalty and affection, and to revive old memories. I think you do that sort of thing better here than we do in England. We are endeavouring now at Oxford, by means of the Oxford Society, to provide lasting contacts between graduates, and you have done that in America for many generations.

I am told that besides expressing my gratitude to you I must say a few words. What am I to talk about? Not public affairs, for a goverenor-general has no views but must keep himself virginally aloof from politics. He represents his King, and it is a primary maxim of English law that the King can do no wrong, and therefore he - and his representatives - cannot be politicians. And I am not going to talk the usual platitudes about how closely related the United States and the British Empire are, and what good friends they should be. I believe most profoundly in that friendship, but don't let's get self-conscious about it. Don't let's be pulling up the plant to see how the roots are getting on. I think the best way for Americans and Britons to undeerstand each other is not by analysing their feelings, but by doing things together. I would suggest especially going fishing.

And I am certainly not going to weary you with any talk about education, though it is a matter very close to my heart, and as the Chancellor of a great Scottish University I have many views on the subject. But I should like to be allowed to say one thing which is a sincere confession of faith. You will hear foolish people to-day say that our youth is declining in quality, and that it is

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losing the enterprise and the pioneering zest of its fathers. I believe that to be wholl y untrue. I believe that youth, so far as I know it, and that is in the United States and the British Empire, has never been better. I have been President from the start of a thing called the Oxford Exploration Club, where we offer nothing except discomfort and danger, and yet that club has a far bigger waiting list than any other club in the University. A few years ago I took the trouble to find out what some of my son's contemporaries at Oxford were doing in the long vacation, and I found the following:- deck-hand on a Hull trawler in the White Sea; working at the Canadian harvest; purser in a South American liner; helping Welsh miners to cultivate the land; trading old rifles in the Arctic for walrus ivory. I have found the same spirit of enterprise in Canada. I have found it in this country of yours.

It is true that the world is shrinking and that we have no longer the physical frontiers which our fathers had, but we have the spiritual frontiers and the horizon of the mind. We are all of us frontiersmen in a true sense, for we are domiciled on the edge of the unknown, and have to face novelties more startling than any which confronted the old pioneers. A graduate of Yale, if he enters an ordinary profession, has to help to maintain that delicate structure, which we call civilisation, in a world which is full of destructive forces. He has to show that the patient methods of democracy are as efficient as any authoritarian short-cut. If he gives his life to the pursuit of knowledge in any sphere, he will not only be doing work of great public importance, but he will be living a life of per-

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petual adventure, since he never knows what small by-product of his investigations may lead to an epoch-making discovery. We can tell our youth that t hey will have a more difficult task than their fathers, that they are called to a severer test and a more momentous duty, and we can also assure them that they have wider horisons to travel to and a greater opportunity to prove the virtue that is in them .