attractive? Man has universally and instinctively put his final award only on the highest qualities. He has been greedy often and selfish, but to his credit it must be said he he has never canonized greed and selfishness. He has called his cities and his famous places after the names of his saints and heroes. There is a certain exaggeration in this saying of Renan, yet a truth in it: "What is the whole of America beside a ray of that infinite glory with which a city of the second or third order-Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Perugia— shines on Italy? The geography of the earth's surface is only the description of so much commonplace gravel until the whole is idealized and transformed and illuminated by the genius of man. Lines to Robert Burns By Irvin Mattick Dedicated to The Burns Club of St. Louis The cruel North wind's bitter gale Thy spirit first beheld the light; The lintwhite's warbling song was hushed, The ever restless, whimpling rill. Across un-charted seas of Youth, Harassed by many a treach'rous strand— Led by the constant star of Truth, Thy soul hath gained the Promised Land: Breathe tunes of thy immortal loves! For each wee creature, great and small, That drinks the wine of heaven's air,- Thy love some earnest praise doth spare: Its perfume on the breath of morn, Thy spirit's anguish ever sheds A gentle sweetness round its thorn! In songs like thine, both coofs and kings And while beneath thy native skies Thy dust in Scotia's bosom sleeps, Through the immortal centuries The world reveres thee,-sings and weeps! The Scotch-According to Johnson By Frederick W. Lehmann January 25, 1915 IT IS said that the ancient Egyptians had always a death's head at their feasts, to remind the guests in the height of their enjoyment, that they were but mortal, and that the hour of doom might strike for any of them at any time. To introduce Doctor Samuel Johnson at a banquet of the Caledonian Society, is very much like bringing a death's head to a feast, for if heed is taken of his opinions, the guests will have small occasion to congratulate themselves upon their nationality. Of the scenery of Scotland the Doctor said, that "the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England," and of its resources, that it afforded "meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient strength to run away from home." In his Dictionary he defined "oats," as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Upon this Lord Elibank cleverly retorted, "very true, and where will you find such horses as in England and such men as in Scotland." The Doctor decried the Scotch universities for their mediocrity of knowledge and said that the reputation of the Scotch for learning was sustained by a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations. They would come up by droves, he said, and attest anything for the honor of Scotland. In the course of a discussion concerning the literary achievements of Scotland and England, a Scotchman exclaimed, “Ah, Dr. Johnson, what would you have said of Buchanan had he been an Englishman?" "Why sir," said Johnson, "I should not have said of Buchanan, had he been an Englishman, what I will now say of him as a Scotchman, that he was the only man of genius his country ever produced." A severe thing to say of a country that in all its history it produced but one man of genius. Doctor Johnson was born in the year 1709 and died in 1784. The Scotland of his youth was a greatly distracted country and had been for more than a hundred years. Remote and isolated as it is from the field of such conflicts as the Thirty Years war and the war of the Spanish Succession, it could yet not escape the spirit of the times and was scourged with its full share of the strifes of religious bigotry and the contentions of opposing dynasties. In Scotland too the feudal system had been carried to the ultimate and persisted in its worst features long after it had disappeared elsewhere. North of the Forth, Scotland was not a nation, but a loose aggregation of clans, whose members recognized no loyalty except to their chief. He was to them the sole and visible embodiment of sovereignty, whose will was law even to taking the life of their fellowman or laying down their own. This division into clans meant frequent quarrels in which the sword and the brand had a constant part. The energy and the efforts of the people were divided and exhausted in opposition and the united endeavor essential to the general welfare and a great national development was utterly impossible. Sir Walter Scott tells an anecdote of Lady Elphinstonn, who lived to the great age of more than a hundred years. When Claverhouse, or Claverse, as the name was called, was introduced to her, he said that having lived so much beyond the allotted term of humanity she must in her time have seen many changes. "Hout na, sir," said the old lady, "the world is just to end with me as it began. When I was entering life there was ane Knox deaving us a' wi' his clavers, and now I am ganging out, there is ane Clavers deaving us a' wi' his knocks." England yielded without commotion its allegiance to the House of Hanover, but Scotland had its uprising for the Stuarts in 1715 and again in 1745. Clan against clan, creed against creed, dynasty against dynasty, it was a sorry time for Scotland, "poor auld Scotland" even Burns called her when he recorded the youthful wish that he for his country's sake, "Some useful plan or book could make What it all meant, not when the Cotter's Saturday Night was written but only a little before Doctor Johnson was born, is grimly indicated by old Fletcher of Saltoun, the man who said that if he could write the songs of a nation, he would not care who wrote its laws. He published a plan for the restoration of peace and order in Scotland. The land was overrun with bands, half mendicant, half brigand, a menace everywhere to life and property and subversive of all stability and order. Fletcher estimated the number of them at two hundred thousand or one fifth of the entire population. The only means of discipline he could see for these people was to subject them to a kind of domestic slavery. Counsels more humane and wiser prevailed. The national determination was to help these people up, and not to hold them down. Education instead of repression was employed and the inherent virtues of the Scottish character were given right direction and ample scope. The change from the old Scotland to the new was not and could not be instant. Here and there, no doubt in too many places and comprehending too many people, far into Johnson's time, lingered a reminder and remainder of the evil days that had been, but true it was now of Scotland as was said by Curran that "she winged her eagle flight, full into the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winked and a wing that never tired" and by virtue of the labors of men whom Dr. Johnson knew or might have known, "she was crowned with the spoils of every art and decked with the wreaths of every muse." She need not hark back two hundred years to George Buchanan as a solitary son of genius, but could present her children of high achievement in every field of civilized endeavor and challenge fair comparison with the world. In philosophy there was Thomas Reid and later Dugald Stewart, as subtle reasoners as any of the metaphysicians of Europe, in physical science Doctor Joseph Black, whose experiments and discoveries in chemistry made him in the judgment of Lavoisier "the Nestor of the Chemical Revolution," and Dr. John Hunter, first among the surgeons of the day. In literature there were Blair, Mackenzie and Thomson, looming now less large than once they did, dwarfed by comparison with younger sons of Scotland. Smollett was dividing honors with Fielding and Richardson in English fiction. Robertson and Hume were writing their histories and if Robertson is not read so much as he was in his own time, if later works have taken the place of his, Hume's history is still the book through which we know the England of the period to which it relates. William Murray had come to England and won high place as a statesman, but greater renown as Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, the greatest judge Britain ever produced. It was his work that brought the commercial law of England into harmony with its commercial usages, and it was he who declared as a principle of law that the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe. Mansfield's accomplishments were too much for even Johnson's prejudice to resist, and he conceded, saving his consistency by the qualification, that "much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young." There came another Scotchman to England, beginning his career in the army, but leaving the profession of arms for that of the law, he attained a first place in the annals of the English bar, Thomas, afterward Lord Chancellor Erskine, whose forensic arguments are today the inspiration and despair of every lawyer ambitious of the fame of eloquence. Him also, the Doctor would accept as a great man and also explain as having been caught young. There was a third however, caught young, but caught in America, of whom we may be sure the Doctor did not approve, and we need not wonder at this, and that was John Paul Jones, the first man to carry the American flag across the seas, and the first to whom in fair and equal fight a British frigate was made to lower her colors. And this Scotchman had humor as well as courage, for when he learned that his opponent, Captain Pearson, had been made a baronet for his gallant defense of his ship, he said, if he will give me another chance I'll see to it that they make a lord of him. In the year 1776 appeared the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, a book that marks an era in political literature and that may fairly be said to have created the science of political economy. Much as has been written upon the subject it maintains its place as the classic of economic science. The principles it announces are the staples of present day political discussion and it is the armory from which are drawn the arguments by which those principles are supported. Its doctrines have not received universal assent, but they compel universal attention and consideration. Around them was waged the chief controversy in the Presidential contest just closed. The quality of genius must reside in a book which dealing with a subject of perennial controversy has maintained its supremacy for more than a hundred years. In the science and art of engineering the Scotland of Johnson's later days claims absolutely first place. James Watt did not discover the great power that was dormant in the elusive vapors of the tea kettle, he did not invent the steam engine. The Marquis of Worcester, Savery, Newcomen and others had labored in that field before him and had done something, much indeed, to make it a thing of utility. But as they left it and as it was found by Watt, it was a crude machine and of simple and limited function. What James Watt did has been so happily described by one of his own countrymen that I would not venture to speak of it in other terms. “We have said that Mr. Watt was the great improver of the steam engine; but in truth as to all that is admirable in its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its action was so regulated as to make it capable of being |