just been accomplished, and of not less anxious preparation for what has yet to be done. We are all of us conscicus of the dark cloud that overhangs us, and all of us know that in the blackness of that darkness there is nought of shame, and that in whatsoever the near future may have in store for us there will be nothing of disgrace. (Applause.) On the afternoon of one of these memorable days of human history, from homes shadowed by such cares and sorrows as no living man in this country can remember, we have come here to rejoice for a brief hour. We have come because we are glad that Scotland once possessed-that she still possesses a great Poet. We are glad that the heart of Scotland still responds to that Poet's great message. We are glad that a citizen of this royal and ancient town, a Magistrate who has served and ruled Stirling long and well, and whose name will be honoured in the long list of those who have been set in authority in this place that the Provost of Stirling has given to his townsmen and the numberless guests drawn here every year by the old and chivalrous fame of this city, a statue of Robert Burns. (Applause.) We are glad because we could see, when the veil fell at the touch of a lady's hand, that this statue is worthy of the scene which it surveys and of the name that it bears. We are here to praise the generosity of the giver and the skill of the artist, and we do both. But it would not be fitting that we should go back to the cares and the anxieties of this day without thinking for a few minutes about the Poet of whose inspiration, undiminished by the passage of time and by the ebb and flow of great events, this generous gift is but one more token and illustration. Many things are said about Robert Burns every year, but I do not think that even this much-speaking generation has exhausted this subject, and there are many lines of thought which might be followed by a speaker on an occasion like this. Yet it seems to me to be no time for an ambitious effort to add to the stress of literary criticism, and I have chosen to-day a very simple theme. I have put together some of the references in Burns's poems to what is just now in all our minds, to what we in this country and in this generation have been taught to speak of and to think of as the curse of war. Accursed it is, and yet this hell-born thing has so often been redeemed by high mind and courage, by the glory of self-sacrifice, by mercy itself, by hatred of tyranny and oppression, by the effort of the strong to bear the burdens of the weak, by lives freely rendered up to God for home and country, by unforgettable deeds of daring, by faith and by valour-it has so often been thus redeemed, that poets have sung of war almost as they have sung of love. (Applause.) They have thought more of its heroism than of its miseries, more of its redemption than of the evils that can never be redeemed. Among those singers, one of whose characteristic notes has been the glory of the well-fought field, we cannot place Robert Burns. He was not distinctively a martial Poet; yet he could be stirred to martial song and he could express in immortal words both the memories of the battles of the past and the determination which wins the battles of the present. His short life opened and closed in time of war. That famous blast o' Januar' wind blew over a country engaged in the seven years' struggle which brought the British name into Canada and made it supreme over a large portion of India. (Applause.) The year of his birth was the year of the triumphant death of one of the noblest soldiers who ever drew sword in his country's need-James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec. (Applause.) Peace was made when Burns was in his fifth year, and his boyhood was undisturbed by wars and rumours of wars. He was sixteen when Great Britain was plunged into that unfortunate conflict with the American Colonies, about which we like to remember only some of the gallant deeds of the years when this nation stood alone against all the powers of Europe, the years that saw the heroic defence of Gibraltar and the victories of Rodney. The most inglorious end of any British war came in 1783, when Burns was twenty-four, and then there was a ten years' peace until Revolutionary France declared war, a war which lasted the three years of life which remained to Robert Burns, and which continued, almost without intermission, until he had been nineteen years in his grave. When the French Revolution broke out, Burns, like other great poets of his time, was touched to deep sympathy and admiration. He hailed it as a great blow struck for Freedom, for the freedom he loved with a passionate love, a love enshrined in much of his greatest work. We know this from his letters, and we know it too from his fierce verses on the desertion of the French cause by the French general Dumourier, whose crime was to prefer his own honour to that of his country. When the news of Dumourier's flight into the camp of the Austrians reached Dumfries, Burns heard some one expressing satisfaction at the incident, and he wrote a parody on "Robin Adair," in which he greeted Dumourier in language which, on the lips of Robert Burns, was a bitter taunt :"You're welcome to Despots, Dumourier." He scornfully offered to fight and take his chance in the traitor's company : "Then let us fight about, Dumourier ; Then let us fight about, Dumourier; Then let us fight about, 'Till freedom's spark is out, Then we'll be damned, no doubt-Dumourier." But when it was evident that the French struggle for liberty had become a struggle for conquest and for the glory that comes of slaughter; when France was becoming the terror of Europe, and the unholy star of Napoleon Bonaparte was rising; when our great peace-loving Pitt found himself compelled to continue the war he had tried to avoid; above all, when the safety of this land was in danger, Burns spoke in no uncertain tones, and his voice was for a righteous and a necessary war. In the last year of his life, the menace of an invasion brought about the Volunteer movement, a homely and amusing description of which will be recalled by readers of John Galt. Two companies of Volunteers were formed in Dum fries, and one of them bore on its roll of members the name of Robert Burns, and the poem which that Dumfries Volunteer wrote about his fellows proved the best recruiting agent of the time. "Does haughty Gual invasion threat"? he asked; and though our enemies of 1795 are our friends and allies of to-day, it is in this respect alone that the poem fails to be appropriate now. The spirit of the lines "The Nith shall rin to Corsincon, And Criffel sink in Solway, Ere we permit a foreign foe On British ground to rally!" is the spirit which is raising our new arnies this year. (Applause.) The appeal for a cessation of party strife is an appeal to which we have already responded : The patriotism which inspired these verses was no novel emotion, created by the alarm of the time. Burns had long ago been moved by love of country to sing of the heritage which had been won on the stricken field. "Wha will be a traitor knave? he had asked, in language which fitted the circumstances of 1795 (and which fits the circumstances of 1914), as well as it does those of that great day the 600th return of which was celebrated in this martial town last June. (Applause.) I have quoted the example which is most familiar and which best comes home to us. But it does not stand alone :: "Oh, glorious deed to stay a tyrant's hand! Oh, heavenly joy to free our native land ! And Burns had written in his fragment on the great King Robert. again, in language which, with some few changes of names, we can apply to our own times, he described how-- "The wild Scandinavian boar issued forth To wanton in carnage and wallow in gore: O'er countries and kingdoms their fury prevailed, THE SOLDIER'S RESPONSE TO DUTY. 66 Freedom and patriotism, though they form a great part of it, do not entirely sum up Burns's attitude to war. The Dumfries Volunteer of 1795, no soldier by profession, no swashbuckler in sympathy, knew something of those virtues of the soldier, which, as far as human virtues can, tend to the redemption of the foul spirit of war. And here I instance, first and foremost, "The Jolly Beggars." The scene, in Sir Walter Scott's words, " is laid in the very lowest department of low life, the actors being a set of strolling vagrants met to carouse and barter their rags and plunder for liquor in a hedge alehouse. Yet," he adds, even in describing the movements of such a group, the native taste of the Poet has never suffered his pen to slide into anything coarse or disgusting." Scott's tribute does not exhaust-was not meant to exhaust-the praise of the "Jolly Beggars." There is much to be said about it. My point to-day is this-that one of these vagrants sings a song which shows the Poet's appreciation of the essential nobility of the soldier's response to duty. The randy gangrel body" singing in Poosie Nansie's public-house has known what it was to welcome the French at the sound of the drum," he has seen Wolfe breathe his last at Quebec, he has helped to destroy the Spaniards' floating batteries outside Gibraltar in the course of Elliot's defence, the most glorious feat of arms within the Poet's own recollection : 66 "I lastly was with Curtis, among the floating batt'ries, |