e is what you came to St. Andrews
for. With some alarums and excursions into college life. That is
what I propose, but, of course, the issue lies with M'Connachie.

Your betters had no share in the immediate cause of the war; we know
what nation has that blot to wipe out; but for fifty years or so we
heeded not the rumblings of the distant drum, I do not mean by lack
of military preparations; and when war did come we told youth, who
had to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really is and of the
clover beds to which it leads.

We were not meaning to deceive, most of us were as honourable and as
ignorant as the youth themselves; but that does not acquit us of
failings such as stupidity and jealousy, the two black spots in
human nature which, more than love of money, are at the root of all
evil. If you prefer to leave things as they are we shall probably
fail you again. Do not be too sure that we have learned our lesson,
and are not at this very moment doddering down some brimstone path.

I am far from implying that even worse things than war may not come
to a State. There are circumstances in which nothing can so well
become a land, as I think this land proved when the late war did
break out and there was but one thing to do. There is a form of
anaemia that is more rotting than even an unjust war. The end will
indeed have come to our courage and to us when we are afraid in dire
mischance to refer the final appeal to the arbitrament of arms.
I suppose all the lusty of our race, alive and dead, join hands on
that.

'And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.'

But if you must be in the struggle, the more reason you should know
why, before it begins, and have a say in the decision whether it is
to begin. The youth who went to the war had no such knowledge, no
such say; I am sure the survivors, of whom there must be a number
here to-day, want you to be wiser than they were, and are certainly
determined to be wiser next time themselves. If you are to get that
partnership, which, once gained, is to be for mutual benefit, it will
be, I should say, by banding yourselves with these men, not defiantly
but firmly, not for selfish ends but for your country's good. In the
meantime they have one bulwark; they have a General who is befriending
them as I think never, after the fighting was over, has a General
befriended his men before. Perhaps the seemly thing would be for us,
thei