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Hokitika Guardian, 8 September 1920, Page 2

In the course of a very effective address at Edinburgh recently, Mr Rudyard Kipling went on to say:—“An Englishman looks upon the record of Edinburgh University not with fear, but with envy. Have you ever considered what these great buildings of yours seen from the South loom up as one of a great chain of well-devised Border fortresses, and keeps of learning which generation after generation have trained and equipped the Scot for his conquest of the world in almost every detail of the world’s development and administration?' A stranger might be forgiven for thinking that, though the liberality of.your citizens made and adorned your university none the less the driving force behind this 300-year-old Dominion of the Scot derives its essence from the strict and unbreakable spirit of that great educationist, John Knox. It was John Knox who at life long hazard laid down and maintained the canon that it should be lawful for men so to use themselves m matters of religion and conscience, os they should answer to their Maker. Is it too much to say that after all these year,s on .these triple foundations of freedom, authority, and responsibility, the moral fabric of your university was reared? Nor did it fail when the bitter and grinding dispensation ff the Great War overtook us. Here, as elswhere, ,the sips of the fathers were visited upon the children. The sons of your university were constrained like' their forbears so "to use themselves m matters of conscience as they should answer to their Maker. All earth has witnessed that they answered a# befitted their ancestry, that they endured as the strong influences about their youth had taught them to endure. They willingly left the unachieved purpose of their live? in order that ill life should not be wrenched from its purpose, and without fear they furped from these gates of learning to those of the grave. It. is their glory, and also that of their severe, but beloved mother who, while she gave them learning, dowered them also with that wfsdom lacking fth.ich pll learning is folly.”