Independence: Rectorial address delivered at St. Andrews October 10, 1923

The sole revenge that Maturity can take upon Youth for the sin of being young, is to preach at it. When I was young I sat and suffered under that dispensation. Now that I am older I purpose, if you, my constituents, will permit me, to hand on the Sacred Torch of Boredom.

In the First Volume, then, of the Pickering Edition of the works of the late Robert Burns, on the 171st page, you will find this stanza:

To catch Dame Fortune’s golden smile, Assiduous wait upon her, And gather gear by every wile That’s justified by honour-- Not for to hide it in a hedge, Nor for a train attendant, But for the glorious privilege Of being independent.

At first sight it may seem superfluous to speak of thrift and independence to men of your race, and in a University that produced Duncan of Ruthwell and Chalmers. I admit it. No man carries coals to Newcastle--to sell; but if he wishes to discuss coal in the abstract, as the Deacon of Dumfries discussed love, he will find Newcastle knows something about it. And so, too, with you here. May I take it that you, for the most part, come, as I did, from households conversant with a certain strictness--let us call it a decent and wary economy--in domestic matters, which has taught us to look at both sides of the family shilling; that we belong to stock where present sacrifice for future ends (our own education may have been among them) was accepted, in principle and practice, as part of life? I ask this, because talking to people who for any cause have been denied these experiences is like trying to tell a neutral of our life between 1914 and 1918.

Independence means, “Let every herring hang by its own head.” It signifies the blessed state of hanging on to as few persons and things as possible; and it leads up to the singular privilege of a man owning himself.

The desire for independence has been, up to the present, an ineradicable human instinct, antedating even the social instinct. Let us trace it back to its beginnings, so that we may not be surprised at our own virtue to-day.

Science tells us that Man did not begin life on the ground, but lived first among tree-tops--a platform which does not offer much room for large or democratic assemblies. Here he had to keep his individual balance on the branches, under penalty of death or disablement if he lost it, and here, when his few wants were satisfied, he had time to realize slowly that he was not altogether like the beasts, but a person apart, and therefore lonely. Not till he abandoned his family-tree, and associated himself with his fellows on the flat, for predatory or homicidal purposes, did he sacrifice his personal independence of action, or cut into his large leisure of brooding abstraction necessary for the discovery of his relations to his world. This is the period in our Revered Ancestor’s progress through Time that strikes me as immensely the most interesting and important.

No one knows how long it took to divide the human line of ascent from that of the larger apes; but during that cleavage there may have been an epoch when Man lay under the affliction of something very like human thought before he could have reached the relief of speech. It is indeed conceivable that in that long inarticulate agony he may have traversed--dumb--the full round of personal experience and emotion. And when, at last, speech was born, what was the first practical use Man made of it? Remember, he was, by that time, past-master in all arts of camouflage known to the beasts. He could hide near a water-hole, and catch them as they came down to drink--which is the germ of war. He could attract them by imitating their cries of distress or love--which is the genesis of most of the arts. He could double back on his tracks and thus circumvent an acquaintance of his own kind who was stalking him--which is obviously the origin of most of our social amenities. In short, he could act, to admiration, any kind of lie then extant. I submit, therefore, that the first use Man made of his new power of expression was to tell a lie--a frigid and calculated lie.