A Man's A Man

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 83, 24 January 1941, Page 4

A Man's A Man

HEN Scots round the world this week drink to the "Immortal Memory," the song most fervently remembered will perhaps. be "A Man’s a Man." It is a song of men for men, and men have never been in such danger before in Scotland or anywhere else. For the purpose of the totalitarian powers is to reduce men to ciphers; to rob them not only of their individuality but of those attributes that make and keep them men-free minds, and free wills. Scotsmen may in fact feel on Saturday night that it is Burns against half the world. Nor does it alter the case in the least that he challenges the other half as well. Wherever sense and worth are in bondage to fools and knaves Burns is a flaming sword of protest. Wherever privilege "struts and stares" and lords it over honest men he flings its pride back in its teeth. But what he says most angrily and most scathingly is that the man who allows it to strut and stare is not a man at all-that a real man dares to be poor, if he must, but does not dare to be ashamed. But what the Dictators are trying to take from us is not so much our food or our clothes or our homes or our trade as our independence of spirit. They will rob us of material things if they can-they have done it to the Jews and are doing it to the Poles. But they must © rob us of our minds and wills or see their whole monstrous system fall in ruins. Burns proclaims the dignity of man. They proclaim the over-ruling importance of the State, by which they mean their own plan, with all its foul tyrannies. Outside the New Testament there is no such passionate declaration as Burns’s of the rights of the individual as an individual. On this side of the Dark Ages there has been no such fiendish attempt as Hitler is making to put the individual into a strait-jacket and keep him there. So every drink tossed off to Burns on Saturday night is a toast to liberty. Every speech made in his honour rallies the chaifiless mind. Every Scot who sings and every Sassenach who joins in singing these five verses puts up five prayers to Heaven for man as man. Every "coward-slave" who hangs his head betrays his country and dishonours his kind.