known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.

But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country, any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a Constable to France, a General-in-Chief to Russia and still again a Lieutenant to Gustavus Adolphus. If evidence were needed of the vigor of the Scottish race, it is readily forthcoming in the fact that for five hundred years the Land O'Cakes enriched the world with the surplus of her able men.

Nurse of heroes, nurse of martyrs, nurse of freemen, are titles which belong of right to our Motherland and she has been justified of her children, at home and abroad. The rolls of honor of many countries and many climes bear their names; there is no field of distinction whether it be of thought or of action that has not witnessed their triumphs. That Scotland has yielded more than her share of the men who have gone forth to the conquest of the world is largely due to the fact that it was part of her discipline that men must first conquer themselves. The weakest of them felt that restraining influence, and the striving after the Scottish ideal, however feeble, has been a protection against sinking into utter baseness. The most wayward scions of the Scottish family have known that influence, and have borne testimony to the beauty of the homely virtues which they failed to practice and the nobility of aspirations which fell short of controlling their life.

It belongs to the character and antecedents of Scotsmen that the attribute of national independence should take so high a place among the objects of human effort and desire. It was because Scotland settled for all time, six hundred years ago, her place as an independent State that she proved herself capable of begetting men like John Knox, Robert Burns and Walter Scott. It is because the vigor of the Scottish race and the adaptiveness of the Scottish genius remain to-day unimpaired, that the lustre of Scottish-names shone so brilliantly during the World War. It may be confidently asserted that, whether regarded as a race or a people no members of the great English-speaking family did more promptly, more cheerfully or more courageously make the sacrifices required to perform their full part in the struggle to defend the freedom that belongs to our common heritage and to preserve the ideals without which we should not regard life as worth living. The union, centuries old, in the Scottish mind and heart of the most uncompromising devotion to individual liberty with the most fervid patriotism, is a sentiment of which the world stands greatly in need to-day. We need not go far to find evidence of how perilous it is to sink regard for the great conception of human brotherhood in a narrow, nationalistic concern for individual interests. In the Scottish conception of liberty, duties have always been rated as highly as rights; it has been a constructive, not a destructive formula; it has been an inspiration to raise men out of themselves, not to prompt them to indulge in antics of promiscuous leveling. The kind of democracy for which Scotsmen have deemed that the world should be made safe is a human brotherhood, indeed, but a brotherhood imbued with the generous rivalry of effort, the enthusiasm of emulous achievement, and not one of inglorious, monotonous and colorless equality.

JOHN FOORD

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