on one wing.  I should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him.  I have sworn that M’Connachie shall not interfere with this address to-day; but there is no telling.  I might have done things worth while if it had not been for M’Connachie, and my first piece of advice to you at any rate shall be sound:  don’t copy me.  A good subject for a rectorial address would be the mess the Rector himself has made of life.  I merely cast this forth as a suggestion, and leave the working of it out to my successor.  I do not think it has been used yet.

My own theme is Courage, as you should use it in the great fight that seems to me to be coming between youth and their betters; by youth, meaning, of course, you, and by your betters us.  I want you to take up this position:  That youth have for too long left exclusively in our hands the decisions in national matters that are more vital to them than to us.  Things about the next war, for instance, and why the last one ever had a beginning.  I use the word fight because it must, I think, begin with a challenge; but the aim is the reverse of antagonism, it is partnership.  I want you to hold that the time has arrived for youth to demand that partnership, and to demand it courageously.  That to gain courage is what you came to St. Andrews for.  With some alarums and excursions into college life.  That is what I propose, but, of course, the issue lies with M’Connachie.

Your betters had no share in the immediate cause of the war; we know what nation has that blot to wipe out; but for fifty years or so we heeded not the rumblings of the distant drum, I do not mean by lack of military preparations; and when war did come we told youth, who had to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really is and of the clover beds to which it leads.

We were not meaning to deceive, most of us were as honourable and as ignorant as the youth themselves; but that does not acquit us of failings such as stupidity and jealousy, the two black spots in human nature which, more than love of money, are at the root of all evil.  If you prefer to leave things as they are we shall probably fail you again.  Do not be too sure that we have learned our lesson, and are not at this very moment doddering down some brimstone path.

I am far from implying that even worse things than war may not come to a State.  There are circumstances in which nothing can so well become a land, as I think this land proved when the late war did break out and there was but one thing to do.  There is a form of anaemia that is more rotting than even an unjust war.  The end will indeed have come to our courage and to us when we are afraid in dire mischance to refer the final appeal to the arbitrament of arms.  I suppose all the lusty of our race, alive and dead, join hands on that.

   ’And he is dead who will not fight;
   And who dies fighting has increase.’