governments, ecclesiastical and civil. That peace springs from terror, that submission from ignorance, that silence from despair! Compare the stillness of despotism with the healthful animation, the natural warmth, the bold language, the proud bearing, which spring from freedom and the consciousness of its possession. Which will you prefer? Insult not the dignity of mankind by supposing that contentment of the heart can exist under despotism; there may be degrees in its severity, and so degrees in the sufferings of its victims. Terrible are dangers which lurk beneath the calm surface of despotic power; the movements of the oppressed will at all times disturb their tyrant's tranquillity, and warn him their day of vengeance or of triumph may be nigh. Why do you love, why do other nations honour, England? Are you, are they, dazzled by her naval or military glories, the splendour of her literature, her sublime discoveries in science, her boundless wealth, her almost incredible labours in every work of art and skill? No! You love, you cling to England because she has been for ages past the seat of free discussion, and therefore the home of rational freedom and the hope of oppressed men throughout the world. Emulate this day the great virtues of Englishmen their love of fairness, their immovable independence, and the sense of justice rooted in their nature these are the virtues which qualify jurors to decide the rights of their fellow-men: deserted by these, of what avail is the tribunal of a jury? 'Tis worthless as the living body when the human soul has fled. Believe me, you will not secure the true interest of England by leaning too severely on your countrymen; they say to their English brethren, we have been by your side whenever danger was to be faced or honour won; the scorching sun of the East, and the pestilence of the West, we have endured to spread your commerce, to extend your empire, to uphold your glory; the bones of our countrymen have whitened the fields of Portugal, of Spain, of France; fighting your battles they fell, in a nobler cause they could not; we have helped to gather you imperishable laurels, we have helped to win you immortal triumphs. Now, in the time of peace, we ask you to restore that Parliament planted here with your laws and language, uprooted in a dismal period of our history -in the moment of our terror, our divisions, our weakness, it may be, our crime. Re-establish the Commons on the broad foundation of the People's choice; replace the Peerage, the Corinthian pillars of the capital, secured and adorned by the strength and splendour of the Crown, and let the monarch of England, as in ages past, rule a brilliant and united Empire in solidity, magnificence, and power. When the privileges of the English Parliament were invaded, that people struck down the ministry, took the field, and dragged their sovereign to the block. We shall not imitate the English precedent while we struggle for a Parliament. Its surest bulwark, that Institution which you prize so highly, was ours for six hundred years; restore the blessing, and we will be content. This prosecution is not necessary for the maintenance of the authority and prerogative of the Crown; our gracious Sovereign needs no state prosecutions to secure her prerogatives or preserve her power; she has the unbought loyalty of a chivalrous and gallant people. The arm of authority she needs not to raise. The glory of her gentle reign will be-she will have ruled not by the sword, but by the affections; that the true source of her power has been, not in the terrors of the law, but in the hearts of her people. Your patience is exhausted. If I have spoken suitably to the subject, I have spoken as I have wished; but if, as you may think, deficiently, I have spoken as I could. Do you, from what has been said, and from the better arguments omitted, which may be well suggested by your manly understanding and your honest hearts, give a verdict consistent with justice, yet inclining to libertydictated by truth, yet leaning to the side of the accused men, struggling against the weight, power, and influence of the Crown, and prejudice more overwhelming still; a verdict undesired by a party, but to be applauded by the impartial monitor within your breasts -becoming the high spirit of Irish gentlemen and the intrepid guardians of the rights and liberties of a free people. 5.-LORD MACAULAY'S SPEECH AT THE [From his Inaugural Address, on his election as Lord Rector, March 21, 1819. Born 1800. Died 1859.] Look at the world a hundred years after the seal of Pope Nicholas the Fifth had been affixed to the instrument which called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland especially, in the agonies of that revolution which we emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated. Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended, and that talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in knowledge as a handmaid to decorate superstition, and their error produced its natural effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists, as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual tyranny. They formed in fact the vanguard of that movement. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a Reformer, In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within the reach of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University closed. Pass another hundred years, and we are in the midst of another revolution. The war between Popery and Protestantism had, in this island, been terminated by the victory of Protestantism. But from that war another war had sprung, the war between Prelacy and Puritanism. The hostile religious sects were allied, intermingled, confounded with hostile political parties. The monarchical element of the constitution was an object of almost exclusive devotion to the Prelatist. The popular element of the constitution was especially dear to the Puritan. At length an appeal was made to the sword. Puritanism triumphed; but Puritanism was already divided against itself. Independency and Republicanism were on one side, Presbyterianism and limited Monarchy on the other. It was in the very darkest part of that dark time; it was in the midst of battles, sieges, and executions; it was when the whole world was still aghast at the awful spectacle of a British king standing before a judgment seat, and laying his neck on a block; it was when the mangled remains of the Duke of Hamilton had just been laid in the tomb of his house; it was when the head of the Marquis of Montrose had just been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that your University completed her second century. A hundred years more, and we have at length reached the beginning of a happier period. Our civil and religious liberties had, indeed, been bought with a fearful price. But they had been bought. The price had been paid. The last battle had been fought on British ground. The last black scaffold had been set up on Tower Hill. The evil days were over. A bright and tranquil century, a century of religious toleration, of domestic peace, of temperate freedom, of equal justice, was beginning. That century is now closing. When we compare it with any equally long period in the history of any other great society, we shall find abundant cause for thankfulness to the Giver of all good. Nor is there any place in the whole kingdom better fitted to excite this feeling than the place where we are now assembled. For in the whole kingdom we shall find no district in which the progress of trade, of manufactures, of wealth, and of the arts of life, has been more rapid than in Clydesdale. Your University has partaken largely of the prosperity of this city and of the surrounding region. The security, the tranquillity, the liberty, which have been propitious to the industry of the merchant, and of the manufacturer, have been also propitious to the industry of the scholar. To the last century belong most of the names of which you justly boast. The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all the illustrious men who during that period, taught or learned wisdom within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists, philologists, metaphysicians, poets; Simpson and Hunter, Millar and Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single man has done, since the "New Atlantis" of Bacon was written, to accomplish that glorious prophecy. Another secular period is now about to commence. There is no lack of alarmists, who will tell you that it is about to commence under evil auspices. But from me you must expect no such gloomy prognostications. I have heard them too long and too constantly to be scared by them. Ever since I began to make observations on the state of my country, I have seen nothing but growth, and heard of nothing but decay. The more I contemplate our noble institutions, the more convinced I am that they are sound at heart, that they have nothing of age but its dignity, and that their strength is still the strength of youth. The hurricane which has recently overthrown so much that was great, and that seemed durable, has only proved their solidity. They still stand, august and immovable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruin all around I see no reason to doubt that, by the blessing of God on a wise and temperate policy, on a policy of which the principle is to preserve what is good by reforming in time what is evil, our civil institutions may be preserved unimpaired to a late posterity, and that under the shade of our civil institutions our academical institutions may long continue to flourish. us. 6.-LORD PALMERSTON ON COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS. THERE is nothing, pernaps, more remarkable in the progress of the country than the advance which of late years has been made in the diffusion and in the quality of education. The advance which England has made in population, in wealth, in everything that constitutes in common opinion the greatness of a country, is well known and most extraordinary. But we should, indeed, have been wanting in our duties as a nation if we had not accompanied that progress in wealth and population by a corresponding progress in the development of the intellectual faculties of the people. There was a time, now long gone by, when envious critics, who wanted to run down the Universities of the land, said they might be likened to hulks moored in a rapid current, where they served only to mark the rapidity of the stream. That has long since ceased to be a true representation of our Universities. They have improved the course, the object, and the direction of their studies, and they may now fearlessly vie with the academical institutions of any country in the world. Certain objections have been made to the system of competitive examinations. Some people say it leads to cramming. It often happens that when mankind seize upon a word they imagine that word to be an argument, and go about repeating it, thinking they have arrived at some great and irresistible conclusion. So, when they pronounce the word "cramming," they think they have utterly discredited the system to which that word is by them applied. Some people seem to imagine that the human mind is like a bottle, and that when you have filled it with anything you pour it out again and it becomes as empty as it was before. That is not the nature of the human mind. The boy who has been crammed, to use the popular word, has, in point of fact, learned a great deal, and that learning has accomplished two objects. In the first place the boy has exercised the faculties of his mind in being crammed, and in the next place there remains in his mind a great portion of the knowledge so acquired, and which probably forms the basis of future attainment in different branches of education. Depend upon it that the boy who is crammed, if he is crammed successfully, not only may succeed in the examination for which he is preparing, but is from that time forward more intellectual, better informed, and more disposed to push forward the knowledge which by that cramming he has acquired. It is also said that you are teaching young men a great variety of things which will be of no use to them in the career which they are destined to pursue, and that you are pandering to their vanity by making them believe they are wiser than they really are. These objections, also, are in my opinion utterly futile. As to vanity and conceit, those are most vain and conceited who know the least. The more a man knows, the more he acquires a conviction of the extent of that which he does not know. A man ought to know a great deal to acquire a knowledge of the immensity of his ignorance. If competitive examination is not liable to objection upon the score that it tends to raise undue notions of superiority on the part of those who go through it, so also it is a great mistake to imagine that a range of knowledge disqualifies a man for the particular career and profession to which he is destined. Nothing can be more proper than that a young man, having selected a particular profession, should devote the utmost vigour of his mind to qualify himself for it by acquiring the knowledge which is necessary for distinction in that line of life; but it would be a great mistake for him to confine himself to that study alone, and you may be sure that the more a young man knows of a great variety of subjects, and the more he exercises his faculties in acquiring a great range of knowledge, the better he will perform the duties of his particular profession. That sort of general knowledge may be likened to the gymnastic exercises to which soldiers are accustomed. It is not that it can be expected that these particular movements would be of any use to them on the day of battle; but these gymnastic exercises render their muscles flexible, strengthen their limbs, invigorate their health, and make them better able to undergo fatigue, and to adapt themselves to all cir |