Independence: Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews October 10, 1923
9781465673152
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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.
