ren, at home and abroad. The rolls of honor of many countries and
many climes bear their names; there is no field of distinction whether
it be of thought or of action that has not witnessed their triumphs.
That Scotland has yielded more than her share of the men who have gone
forth to the conquest of the world is largely due to the fact that it
was part of her discipline that men must first conquer themselves. The
weakest of them felt that restraining influence, and the striving
after the Scottish ideal, however feeble, has been a protection
against sinking into utter baseness. The most wayward scions of the
Scottish family have known that influence, and have borne testimony to
the beauty of the homely virtues which they failed to practice and the
nobility of aspirations which fell short of controlling their life.

It belongs to the character and antecedents of Scotsmen that the
attribute of national independence should take so high a place among
the objects of human effort and desire. It was because Scotland
settled for all time, six hundred years ago, her place as an
independent State that she proved herself capable of begetting men
like John Knox, Robert Burns and Walter Scott. It is because the vigor
of the Scottish race and the adaptiveness of the Scottish genius
remain to-day unimpaired, that the lustre of Scottish-names shone so
brilliantly during the World War. It may be confidently asserted that,
whether regarded as a race or a people no members of the great
English-speaking family did more promptly, more cheerfully or more
courageously make the sacrifices required to perform their full part
in the struggle to defend the freedom that belongs to our common
heritage and to preserve the ideals without which we should not regard
life as worth living. The union, centuries old, in the Scottish mind
and heart of the most uncompromising devotion to individual liberty
with the most fervid patriotism, is a sentiment of which the world
stands greatly in need to-day. We need not go far to find evidence of
how perilous it is to sink regard for the great conception of human
brotherhood in a narrow, nationalistic concern for individual
interests. In the Scottish conception of liberty, _duties_ have always
been rated as highly as _rights_; it has been a constructive, not a
destructive formula; it has been an inspiration to raise men out of
themselves, not to prompt them to indulge in antics of promiscuous
leveling. The kind of