YOU must remember that an Englishman looks on the record of Edinburgh University, not with fear, but with envy. Your University represents sacredly and intimately the natural expression of the genius and sacrifice, the spirit and devotion of your race. But have you ever considered that these great buildings of yours, seen from the south, loom up as one of a great chain of well-devised Border fortresses and keeps of learning which, generation after generation, have trained and equipped the Scot for his conquest of the world in almost every detail of the world’s development and administration? Many excuses for these overwhelming facts have been put forward by the overwhelmed. One has heard it argued that a race born among granite boulders and compelled, at an early age, to seek their sustenance from under the snow would naturally find any condition of life elsewhere sub-tropically luxurious. It is true, too, that surroundings which enforce a certain wise thrift do save a man from wasting his soul on barren emotions in spiritual matters, as well as from lending himself to the grosser cruelties of collective sentimentalism.

A stranger, speaking with due deference, might be forgiven for thinking that, though the liberality of your citizens made and adorned your University, none the less, the driving force behind this three-hundred-year-old dominion of the Scot derives in essence from the strict and ............