SCOTTISH TRADITION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 846, 19 January 1883, Page 2

SCOTTISH TRADITION.

In the course of his inaugural speech as Lord Rector of the Edinburgh University, Earl Rosebery spoke as follows :—These matters cannot be indifferent to any of you; to the Scotsmen in this hall they are vital, becapse on them in the ensuing generation it depends to preserve Scottish tradition and maintain Scottish character. Much of that character has beep taken away from us by the swift amalgamating powers of railways, by the centralisation of Anglicising empire, by the compassionate sneer of the higher civilisation. Much is passing away, much more must pass away ; and it i§ well. Your old draperies, your old tapestries, your old banners, are clutched by the greedy century, andcarded and thrown into the mill, that they may emerge damp sheets for your newspapers; and it is well. Your old bones are pulverised that they may, dress the pastures; and it is well. Your,' abbeys and your castles are quarries for dykes, and prize bothies, and locomotive sheds; and it is well. Your archives cover preserves, your ancestral trees : pave roads, you sound for coal under 1

your old tower and it tumbles about . you? ears, your clan emigrates to Glas- > ' gow or to Canada, the glen is silent “ save tor the' footfall of the deer; and it is well. You scale the low brow of the naighty Helvellyn, and you find a personally conducted tourist drinking bottled beer on the summit; and it is well also. The effigies and splendour of tradition are not meant to cramp the energies or the development of a vigorous and various nation. They are not meant to hold in mortmain the proper territory of human intelligence and righteous aspiration. : They live and teach their lessons in our • annals, they have their own worshippers and their own shrine, but the earth is not theirs nor the fulness thereof. For all that, however, these very annals, andthecharacterstheyinspireand describe, are out intangible property; ,they constitute an inheritance we are not willing to see either squandered or ■ demolished, for they are the title-deeds and heirlooms of our national existence.