In common with some other English public men, Lord Rosebery has the art of speaking gracefully and informally on matters of public interest at occasions not political in character. Such an occasion presented itself on October 25, 1898, when, as President of the Associated Societies of the University of Edinburgh, Lord Rosebery delivered the following address. It will be found to be a good example of a style almost always at ease, yet without the sacrifice of dignity, progressing skilfully from a light attack to a serious and earnest treatment. Perhaps, indeed, the quality is more literary than oratorical.

Mr. ChancellorE and Gentlemen:

I am not sure that this sumptuous Hall with which the generous Mr. M’Ewan has endowed this University is in the nature of an unmixed benefit. It makes too much of an occasion like this. To tell the truth, as I look around me and see this vast audience, I am irresistibly reminded of the most dismal moment that can occur in a man’s life,—the moment when he is about to deliver a Rectorial Address. Happily, there are one or two considerations which reassure me. One is, that the altar is already lighted for another victim, whose sacrifice, in the natural course of things, cannot long be delayed. My other comfort, sir, is that you are in the chair, because, to put it on no higher ground, the Chancellor is never present at a Rector’s Address. The same firmament cannot hold two such planets, and therefore, when I see you there, I am perfectly certain that the impression I derive from this audience is an erroneous one, and that I am not going to deliver a Rectorial Address. Well, sir, we welcome you here for every reason. We are glad to see you in your place as Chancellor. We are glad to see you on any plea in Edinburgh; and what I am happy to think of is this: that we can ensure you in that chair for the next fifty minutes what, perhaps, you can obtain nowhere else, a period of unbroken repose, untroubled by colleagues, untroubled by Cabinets, undisturbed even by boxes or telegrams; and if you, sir, will take my advice, you will take advantage of that repose. But, gentlemen, if I can explain why the Rector is not here, and why the Chancellor is, it is perhaps more difficult to explain to myself why I am here. It is partly, no doubt, because in an unwary moment I accepted this responsible office, which has such onerous duties. But it is also due to another circumstance,—that, when we were last in this Hall, you invited me, somewhat clamorously, to address you. I am a person, however, accustomed to walk in the established order of things: I could not interrupt the programme. It would neither have been dulce nor decorum for me to speak on that occasion. But to-night I am here to respond to that invitation. To-night, it is perhaps decorum that I should speak; and if it can ever be dulce to make a speech, it is dulce on this occasion. But, at any rate, let us be quite clear in our understanding. I am not going to deliver a Rectorial Address—nothing so elaborate, nothing so educational. Simply, I trust, it will be a short speech on common-sense lines, and without rising to the heights of the other occasion to which I have alluded.

Now, sir, with a view to the adequate performance of my functions to-night, I have been reading the address of my predecessor, our friend Professor Masson, and as I am quite sure that you have all read Professor Masson’s address too, it will not be necessary on this occasion to condescend upon details. You know more than I do about the constitution of these Societies, and you may perhaps be able—which I am not—to decide as to their relative antiquity. But there is one sinister and significant sentence in Professor Masson’s address to which I commend your attention. He says that for sixteen years the post of President was vacant, because no one could be found willing to accept the responsibility of delivering the Presidential Address. Now, if that does not move your compassion for the person who has that courage, your hearts must be harder than adamant. There is another sentence which produced a great awe and effect upon my mind. It is said that the Societies had done much good work which did not seem affected materially by the absence or the presence of their President, and as specimen of that good work he said that no less than twenty thousand essays had been delivered to the Societies in the course of their existence. Twenty thousand essays! That is a hard saying. Twenty thousand essays, blown into space! And it leads further to this appalling calculation, that if a gentleman hearing of the Associated Societies had determined to improve his mind by reading these essays, and had determined to read one every day before breakfast, it would have been sixty years before he had accomplished the task. Now, that to me, I confess, is not the precious fact in connection with these Societies. What to me is precious is this, that they garnered up so much of what is illustrious, both in regard to memories and to men in connection with Edinburgh. Take, for example, the Dialectic Society, which was founded in 1787. Well, how brilliant was Edinburgh in 1787! A race was growing up in your schools and in your universities which was destined afterwards, through the means of the Edinburgh Review, to influence largely both the taste and the policy of these islands. They were at that time pretty young, the most of them. Cockburn—Lord Cockburn—was being flogged every ten days at the High School, every ten days according to a minute and pathetic calculation that he has left behind him. Jeffrey—Lord Jeffrey—was at that time entering Glasgow University in his fourteenth year; and as for Lord Brougham, he was at that moment commencing a career of conflict by a struggle with a master of his class, in which, I need hardly say, Brougham came off victorious. Dugald Stewart was lecturing at that time, not merely to Edinburgh, but to the kingdom, and almost to the world at large, and Edinburgh was the centre to which all the intellect of Great Britain might, without exaggeration, be said to have gravitated. At that time the English universities were slumbering. Jeffrey had indeed taken a taste of Oxford, but liked it not. His biographer carefully says that “his College was not distinguished by study and propriety alone.” This shocked Jeffrey, and he left it. But in any case these were the golden days of Edinburgh. It was then unrivalled as an intellectual centre, unrivalled in a sense that it can never be again. Some will say that all that is gone. Well, as for the intellectual supremacy, that could not survive in the general awakening of the world. But what I also fear has gone, is the resident, inherent originality which then distinguished our city. Railways and the Press have made that impossible; for, after all, true originality can scarcely exist but in the backwaters of life. The great ocean of life smooths and rolls its pebbles to too much the same shape and texture. Those famous judges of whom we read, with something between a smile and a tear,—Braxfield and Eskgrove and Newton and Hermand,—are just as impossible in these days as the black bottles with which they stimulated their judicial attention on the bench. They are as impossible as that cry of “Gardez-loo” which meant so much to the passer-by on the streets. Well, after all, we must take the rough with the smooth, and the good with the bad. “Gardez-loo” itself was only the symbol of hideous physical impurities, which we none of us should regret; and perhaps even some of those social glories, over which we are so accustomed to gloat in the past, might not have been entirely agreeable had we to realize them in the present. Take these old judges whom I mentioned. They are very picturesque and interesting figures; but I am not sure that any of us could have faced them in the character of a defendant or an accused person without a qualm, more especially if we were opposed to them in politics, and even—if tradition lies not—even if we were their opponents at chess. And if we were in that unfortunate and perhaps discreditable position, we should go and seek our legal adviser, not, as now, in the decorous recesses of Queen Street or of George Street, but, as Colonel Mannering went to seek him, at Clerihugh’s, enjoying “high jinks” in the midst of a carousal, from which he could hardly tear himself for matters of the most vital import to his client.

Well, of course it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of His Time”—and I hope that you all do read it, and read it at least once a year, because no resident of Edinburgh can properly enjoy his city without reading Lord Cockburn once a year—it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn without seeing that he was an optimist. But even he says of the Edinburgh of his time—which he says was so unrivalled—even he describes it as “always thirsty and unwashed.” Well, I am not quite sure when I read that description if we should have thought the Edinburgh of 1787 as delightful as he did. I hardly venture to risk myself in this line of conjecture. Should we all have appreciated Jeffrey as much as he did? That must remain in the realms of the unknowable and the unknown. But there is worse behind. There is even treason talked about the divine Sir Walter Scott. In that very delightful book which furnishes so much leisurely reading for the Scotsman or the Scotswoman, or for anybody,—I mean “Memoirs of a Highland Lady,”—I came upon this sentence, which I have never since been able to digest. It says about Sir Walter Scott, “He went out very little,” and, when he did go, that “he was not an agreeable gentleman, sitting very silent, looking dull and listless unless an occasional flash lit up his countenance. It was odd, but Sir Walter never had the reputation in Edinburgh that he had elsewhere.” Gentlemen, I veil my face; I cannot get over that, till I remember that a prophet is never a prophet in his own country, and there may have been people, even in Edinburgh, who did not think of Sir Walter as we do. But I do not mention all these disagreeable considerations as sheer iconoclasm and blasphemy. No, gentlemen, it is in a very different spirit that I lay them before you. I lay them before you as with a sort of inward groan. They are to me a sort of philosophic potsherd with which I scrape myself. It is in the attempt to comfort myself for living in the Edinburgh of the end of the nineteenth century, and not in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth or the seventeenth or the sixteenth centuries, that thus I endeavor to recall these things, and console myself anew.

Well, I think then there are some circumstances which we should bear in mind before we give way to the wish to exchange new Edinburgh for old Edinburgh. At any rate, there are some circumstances that should discount our enthusiasm. But, indeed, in any case it would not be possible for us of the Associated Societies to concentrate all our interest in Edinburgh as our forefathers did. In the first place, our students, our members, are by no means all Scotsmen. They come from England, and from all over the world. They come here, many of them, to learn arts which they mean to practise and to exercise elsewhere, so that it would be impossible for them to remain in Edinburgh; if they did, indeed, I think that some professions in Edinburgh would be somewhat glutted and overstocked. But, in the second place, there is the railroad, which equally prevents it—the railroad, which has so profoundly stirred up our people, which has so inspired them with the fever of travel, makes concentration in our old capital impossible. By thousands are the strangers that it brings in and takes out of Edinburgh every day, and indeed, as regards its effect on our town, it is something like that of the pipes which convey the water of some hushed and inland loch away to the boisterous strife of cities, and again away from the cities to the eternal ocean. The students of that Edinburgh which was once so difficult to reach and to leave are now whirled away into a thousand whirlpools of civilization; they can no longer huddle around and try to blow up the embers of that ancient Edinburgh which we can only revive in imagination. But of Edinburgh as it exists—the historical, the beautiful, the inspiring—I trust they have taken and are taking a deep draught and a long memory. They are here at the most critical and the most fruitful period of their lives; and sure am I that, whether they wish it or not, they will bear away from this place a seal and a mark and a stamp which can leave them only with life itself.

But, gentlemen, I go a little further in this sense, and I believe that even if the students could remain in Edinburgh and concentrate themselves here, it would be bad for Edinburgh and bad for Scotland, but bad also for the Empire. We in Scotland wish to continue to mould the Empire as we have in the past—and we have not moulded it by stopping at home. Your venerable Principal is an instance in point. And we have even a nearer object-lesson in two returning Viceroys from Canada and from India: Aberdeen—from Canada, where he is by and by to be replaced by a Minto; and Elgin—the second Elgin—from India. Well, I say then that it is not the Edinburgh of Cockburn alone that I wish you to bear in your thoughts to-night, but rather the Edinburgh which has dispersed her sons all over the Empire, the assiduous mother and foster-mother of the builders of our Empire. From the time of Dundas, who almost populated India with Scotsmen, that has always been the function of Scotland; and I look, then, to my colleagues of the Associated Societies not merely as going forth to their several professions and callings in life, but as going forth as potential empire-builders, or at least as empire-maintainers.

You will, gentlemen, when you go forth from these learned precincts and enter upon the actual business of life—you will have in the course of your lives to help to maintain and to build that Empire. You may think that it may be in a small and insignificant manner, not more than the coral insect within the coral reef. But recollect that the insect is essential to the reef; and it is not for any man of himself to measure what his direct utility may be to his country. I will tell you why you must in your way exercise those functions. The British Empire is not a centralized empire. It does not, as other empires, hinge on a single autocrat or even on a single Parliament, but it is a vast collection of communities spread all over the world, many with their own legislatures, but all with their own governments, and, therefore, resting, in a degree which is known in no other state of which history has record, on the intelligence and the character of the individuals who compose it. Some empires have rested on armies, and some on constitutions. It is the boast of the British Empire that it rests on men. For that reason it is that I speak to you to-night as men who are to have your share in the work of the Empire, small or great, humble or proud. That is—unless you go absolutely downwards—your irresistible and irrevocable function. Now, it is quite true that your share in that work may not be official, but even then I would ask, why not? There never was in the history of Great Britain, or, I suspect, of the world, so great a call as now upon the energies and intelligence of men for the public service, and that call, as you, sir, know, is increasing daily. Within Great Britain in my own memory the change in that respect has been very remarkable. What was called the governing class—and which is to some extent the governing class still—when I was a boy had very simple public functions in comparison with those which devolve upon the present race. They went into Parliament as a rule, and they had Quarter Sessions. But Parliament in those days was a very different business from what it is now, and Quarter Sessions—were Quarter Sessions. The burden of Parliament has now indefinitely and almost hopelessly increased, as you, sir, I doubt not, would be willing to depose on oath, if necessary. That takes up for these islands some five hundred and seventy more or less trained intelligences. Then there is the House of Lords, which takes up some—I am not sure of the figures—some five or six hundred more. I do not wish to claim that the House of Lords takes up the whole time of its members; I merely wish to point out that that, again, takes a part of the time, at any rate, of some five or six hundred more of our governing class. Then there is a new institution—the London County Council. That is a body whose work is not less absorbing than that of the House of Commons. It lasts much longer; it is much more continuous, and though not nearly so obtrusive, it is quite as arduous. Well, that consists of a small body of a hundred and thirty-eight members, who must all, who should all, be highly qualified for the function of governing a nation which is not smaller than many self-governing kingdoms. Then there are the great municipalities—great and small. These, no doubt, have to some extent always existed, but not in their present form. A new spirit has been breathed into these somewhat dry bones. The functions of a municipality are sought by men of the highest intelligence; they are not merely sought by men of the highest intelligence, but absorb a very great proportion of the time of these men. They are changed altogether in spirit and in extent. And it is notable now to remark how many men in business plead as a just excuse from entering either the House of Commons or municipal work that they cannot spare the time from the necessary prosecution of their business which would enable them to join in those absorbing avocations. The municipalities of to-day—I know not how many men whose time they absorb, but they are very different from the municipalities of my boyhood, and I suspect that if a Town Councillor of forty or fifty years ago were to present himself in a Town Council of to-day, he would regard their work with astonishment, and they perhaps might look at him with some surprise. Then there are County Councils, District Councils, Parish Councils—all bodies new within the last few years—not all of them absorbing the whole time of their members, but requiring, at any rate, the services of many trained intelligences to keep their work in proper order, and without arrears. Then there are the Government Departments, which swallow up more and more men, and pass them on very often to higher employments. Their work is indefinitely and incalculably increasing. I will give you one symptom. The Foreign Office this year has obtained one new Under-Secretary; and the addition of an Under-Secretary is a cry of distress indeed. Well, the Colonial Office, I see from the papers, is also about to demand an Under-Secretary, and what that means of increase in the subordinate departments is more than I can rightly calculate. But in truth, gentlemen, the whole matter is typified in the constitution of the Cabinet. The present Cabinet requires nineteen men to do what was done by half-a-dozen in the days of Mr. Pitt.

Why do I quote these figures? I quote them to show the enormous drain that the State makes on our intelligent population, besides the drain that it makes both for military and naval purposes. Napoleon was said to drain his population for his warlike purposes. We may be said, if not to drain, at least to skim ours very frequently for the purpose of administration. Now what I have been telling you relates to Great Britain alone. There is, besides, Ireland. Well, I am not going to touch on Ireland. In the first place, it is a different system of administration, and one with which I am not so conversant; and, in the second place, this is at present a harmonious meeting, and I have discovered that there is no topic so likely to terminate the harmony of a meeting as that of the administration or the government of Ireland. I pass beyond that. Outside Great Britain and Ireland there is an enormous drain on our population for administrative purposes. There is India, which takes so many of our young men and trains them so incomparably for every sort of administrative work. There is Egypt, which, is, of course, on a different footing, but which is also very large in her requirements. There is Africa,—not self-governing Africa, but the rest of our Africa,—with its territories, its spheres of influence, and so on, all requiring men to mould them into shape, not necessarily men belonging to the Civil Service or men of formula, but muscular Christians, who are ready to turn their hands to anything. Then, besides that and beyond that there are the outer Britains, if I may so call them, the great common-wealths outside these Islands which own the British Crown—whether Crown Colonies, in which case they require administrators, or self-governing Colonies, in which case they require the whole appurtenance of Parliament, Courts of Law, Ministers, and so forth. Then, outside that again, there are our Diplomatic and Consular services. Well, I do not suppose there ever was in the history of the World half the demand that there is at this hour within the British Empire for young men of ability and skill and training to help to mould that Empire into shape. Never were there so many paths of distinction open within that Empire; while to those who would share in that task of empire-building, and who would do it, not with the hope of amassing much riches, but in a high missionary spirit, never was there such an opportunity as opens at the present moment.

Of course, the base of all this tremendous work of Government is our unparalleled Civil Service. Our Civil Service is our glory and our pride. It is the admiration of all foreigners who see it, but it is, and I think I can appeal to you, sir—it is much more the admiration of those who as political Ministers are called upon to witness its working from within. They constitute the wheels and the springs on which moves the great Juggernaut Car of the State, and if these were once to get out of order, it would be an evil day indeed for Great Britain. But I confess, in my day dreams I have sometimes wished to add to them one other department. I have sometimes wished that there was a department entirely devoted to training young men for the task of administration—men who would afterwards be ready to go anywhere and do anything at a moment’s notice—be ready to go out and administer Uganda, for example, at a week’s notice, ready to go and report anywhere on maladministration with the skill of an expert, able to investigate any subject and report upon it, not in the sense of Royal Commissions, but in a summary and a business-like manner. I should like them, as I say, to go at a word from their superior to any part of the Empire, and be able to do anything, as the militant orders of monasticism used to do—and do now, for aught I know—at the command of their superiors; to be, in fact, a sort of general staff of the Empire. I believe if that could be done it would be an incalculable gain; though I know it is a dream. But then I also know that it is not a bad thing sometimes to dream dreams. Of course, to some extent this function is performed by the Treasury. The Treasury, from its necessary contact with all the other Departments, owing to its being alone able to furnish them with that financial staff of life without which they could not get on, a staff of life which could only be obtained from the Treasury—not always with a smile—does furnish to the other Departments men who are competent to do most things, and to undertake most duties. But that, unfortunately, has been already discovered. Already men have been constantly taken from the Treasury, and if that process be continued much longer that Department will, I fear, be left in what I believe is scientifically called an anÆmic condition. Well, gentlemen, I admit that this is a digression as well as a dream, but my point is this, that there never was so great a demand as now for trained intelligence and trained character in our public service, and I should like to think that we of the Associated Societies will bear our part in it.

Most of you, I suppose, have already chosen the professions that you mean to pursue, and I should by no means wish to see, as the result of what I have said, a general exodus from Edinburgh to the somewhat forbidding portals of the Civil Service examiners. That is not my object, but I venture to point out that official duty is only a very small part of public duty, and that public work is by no means incompatible with other professions and other callings. I do not suppose I need remind you that Walter Scott was a sheriff, and that Robert Burns was an exciseman. But how often have I seen professional men clutch at an opportunity of serving their country, whether on a commission or on a committee, or something of that kind—clutch at it though knowing that it will involve a great waste of time, and therefore a great loss of money—clutch at it as an honor which they cannot sufficiently prize. And I confess, when I see the enormous abilities that are given to our Civil Service and to our public service, either for no remuneration at all, or for remuneration incalculably smaller than the same abilities would have earned in any other calling or profession, I am inclined to think that the public spirit in this country was never higher nor brighter than it is at present. Let me tell you two curious stories which happened within my experience or knowledge with regard to this anxiety to serve the public. A friend of mine who had a high post in the Civil Service was asked, not so very long ago, to undertake some task which was peculiarly congenial to him, and for which he was peculiarly fitted; but he refused it without hesitation, and he gave as his reason this. He said, “When I was appointed to my present post at a very ample remuneration I knew nothing of the work, and it was some years before I could learn the work, to do it to my satisfaction. Now I have learned it, I am in a position in some way to repay the State for what it has done for me, and I shall not leave my post till I feel I have in some degree discharged that debt.” Well, now, a much longer time ago, before I can remember, there was one of the greatest and the wealthiest, and at the same time one of the most dissipated of the English nobility, who, after a life spent, as I say, in a very frivolous manner, was suddenly seized and bitten with the anxiety to occupy some public post under his government, and do some public work; and he applied to the Minister of the day for some quite subordinate post, as he wished to do something to redeem his life. Well, the post was refused, and his life was unredeemed. I give that to you as a specimen, not so uncommon as it may seem, of the anxiety of men, who had not done much in their youth, as they approached middle life to be of some use to their country before they die. And, after all, gentlemen, we are bound to remember this—that we owe something to our country besides rates and taxes. Other countries have compulsory military service. We are released from that; and if only on that consideration I think that we should be prepared to do something for the country which has done so much for us. And even if there is no public work ready to your hand, there are innumerable ways in which we can serve our country, however humbly and however indirectly. I only mention in passing the Volunteer movement. But there are social methods, literary methods, ay, and even athletic methods, because I am one of those who believe that one of the subordinate methods of welding the Empire together, and even of welding the English-speaking races together, is by those Inter-Colonial athletic contests, and athletic contests with the United States, which are developing so much in these days. But what I want to impress upon you is this, that if you keep before you the high motive of serving your country, it will ennoble the humblest acts that you do for her. The man who breaks stones on the road, after all, is serving his country in some way. He is making her roads better for her commerce and her traffic. And if a man asks himself sincerely and constantly the question—“What can I do, in however small a way, to serve my country?”—he will not be long in finding an answer.

Now, I will tell you what I consider the irreducible minimum of this service—the irreducible minimum. It is that you should keep a close and vigilant eye on public and municipal affairs; that you should form intelligent opinions upon them; that you should give help to the men who seem to you worthy of help, and oppose the men whom you think worthy of opposition and condemnation. That I believe to be the irreducible minimum of the debt of a British citizen to his country, and I believe it to be very important to the country. There is no such bad sign in a country as political abstention. I do not want you all to be militant politicians; I do not want it for your sake, or for the country’s sake. But an intelligent interest does not mean a militant interest, though it, at any rate, means the reversal of apathy. We are told that there is a good deal of political apathy in these days. I do not know whether that is so or not, because I have no means of judging. But if there is political apathy, I think the cause of it is not far to seek. Our forefathers, with their defective news agencies or channels, were able to concentrate their mind on one particular subject at a time, and give it all their energy and all their zeal. For example, for some twenty years they were locked in that great war with Napoleon and the French Revolution, which absorbed all their energies, and when that war ceased there came an era of great single questions, on which they were able to concentrate all their attention. But now that is all changed. The telegraph brings you into communication with every quarter of the globe. Every day brings you news of some exciting character from every quarter of the universe, and under this constant and varying pressure the intelligence of men is apt to be dazed, and blunted, and dulled. And yet we know that when, as now, the attention of the country is concentrated on a single point, there is as little apathy as need be.

But I should not appeal even on these grounds to you, gentlemen, if I did not hold a somewhat higher and broader conception of the Empire than seems to be held in many quarters. If I regarded the Empire simply as a means of painting so much of the world red, or as an emporium for trade, I should not ask you to work for it. The land hunger is apt to become land fever, and land fever is apt to breed land indigestion, while trade, however important and desirable in itself, can never be the sole foundation of an empire. Empires founded on trade alone must irresistibly crumble. But the Empire that is sacred to me is sacred for this reason, that I believe it to be the noblest example yet known to mankind of free, adaptable, just government. If that was only your or my opinion it might perhaps be not very well worth having, but it derives singular confirmation from outside. When a community is in distress or under oppression, it always looks first to Great Britain; while in cases which are quite unsuspected, I think, by Great Britain at large, and which are, as a rule, only known to Ministers, they constantly express the wish in some form or other to be united to our country, and to enjoy our government. And, on the other hand, for the most part, in those territories which, for one reason or another, we have at various times ceded, we may, I think, in almost every case see signs of deterioration, and signs of regret on the part of the inhabitants for what they have lost. I ask you, then, gentlemen, to keep this motive before you of public duty and public service, for the sake of the Empire, and also on your own account. You will find it, I believe, the most ennobling human motive that can guide your actions. And while you will help the country by observing it, you will also help yourselves. Life in itself is but a poor thing at best; it consists of only two certain parts, the beginning and the end—the birth and the grave. Between those two points lies the whole area of human choice and human opportunity. You may embellish and consecrate it if you will, or you may let it lie stagnant and dead. But if you choose the better part, I believe that nothing will give your life so high a complexion as to study to do something for your country. And with that inspiration I would ask you to blend some memory of this Edinburgh so sacred and so beautiful to us, not, perhaps, the Edinburgh of Cockburn or Jeffrey or Brougham, but an Edinburgh yet full of noble men and wise teachers, that you will bear away some kindling memory of this old grey city, which, though it be not the capital of the Empire, is yet, in the sense of the sacrifices that it has made, and the generations of men that it has given to the Empire, in the truest, the largest, and the highest sense an Imperial City.