o you to find out in time
the truth about this great game, which your elders play for stakes
and Youth plays for its life.

I do not know whether you are grown a little tired of that word hero,
but I am sure the heroes are. That is the subject of one of our
unfinished plays; M'Connachie is the one who writes the plays.
If any one of you here proposes to be a playwright you can take this
for your own and finish it. The scene is a school, schoolmasters
present, but if you like you could make it a university, professors
present. They are discussing an illuminated scroll about a student
fallen in the war, which they have kindly presented to his parents;
and unexpectedly the parents enter. They are an old pair, backbent,
they have been stalwarts in their day but have now gone small;
they are poor, but not so poor that they could not send their boy
to college. They are in black, not such a rusty black either,
and you may be sure she is the one who knows what to do with his hat.
Their faces are gnarled, I suppose--but I do not need to describe
that pair to Scottish students. They have come to thank the
Senatus for their lovely scroll and to ask them to tear it up.
At first they had been enamoured to read of what a scholar their
son was, how noble and adored by all. But soon a fog settled
over them, for this grand person was not the boy they knew.
He had many a fault well known to them; he was not always so
noble; as a scholar he did no more than scrape through; and he
sometimes made his father rage and his mother grieve. They had
liked to talk such memories as these together, and smile over them,
as if they were bits of him he had left lying about the house.
So thank you kindly, and would you please give them back their boy
by tearing up the scroll? I see nothing else for our dramatist to do.
I think he should ask an alumna of St. Andrews to play the old lady
(indicating Miss Ellen Terry). The loveliest of all young actresses,
the dearest of all old ones; it seems only yesterday that all the men
of imagination proposed to their beloveds in some such frenzied
words as these, 'As I can't get Miss Terry, may I have you?'

This play might become historical as the opening of your propaganda
in the proposed campaign. How to make a practical advance?
The League of Nations is a very fine thing, but it cannot save you,
because it will be run by us. Beware your betters bringing presents.
What is wanted is something run by