The Universities and Commerce

PRESIDENT STAPELLS : The mention of the annual meeting indicates that this is the last luncheon meeting over which I shall have the honor of presiding. Naturally, I am sorry; but I have the rather unique and most welcome coincidence to record here today. It is this: At the first meeting of the club over which I presided, we welcomed an eminent educationist from London, England, in the person of that delightful personality, Sir Arthur Pearson. (Applause.) As you know, he is devoting the latter days of his life to teaching sightless people how not to be blind. And now, at my last meeting, we have the honor to welcome another eminent educationist from London, England, in the person of Dr. Newton. (Applause.) He is devoting his talents to teaching visionless business men the importance of having university trained men in business, and perhaps equally visionless university authorities the importance of having a department to train such men. Now, he is a very important man, it is a very interesting subject, and Dr. Newton is very well qualified to address us upon it, and I will simply ask him to speak to us on "The Universities and Commerce."

DR. NEWTON was received with applause, and said

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doctor Newton is Professor of Imperial History in the University of London. He is on a world tour gathering information on comercial conditions and on the work relative thereto being done in the Universities. He has been given a special travelling commission by the Royal Colonial Institute in preparation for the work which he, is to conduct in the University of London upon his return.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mr. President and Gentlemen, as you will naturally suppose, on rising to speak after such phraseology as your chairman has used I find myself in a condition where my modesty absolutely overcomes me. Luckily, I am able to disclaim either of the intentions with which Mr. Stapells suggested that I came here. I have been filling the POS17 tion of lecturer or professor in Imperial History, and Professor Egerton of Oxford is the only other one who has a similar position, and my task in coming to this continent and going around the world-because I am going to Australia and New Zealand and South Africa-is to deal with the flow of graduate students between all parts of the Empire. When I was talking, on my last visit to Toronto, to Mr. Coombs, we happened to discuss the subject of Commerce, and I told him of some new experiments that are being worked out, not only in the university world of London, but also in the great financial and banking world of London-experiments which have come to fruition in a great scheme for providing commissioned officers for the very highest ranks of commerce, finance, banking and industry. Mr. Coombs then suggested that perhaps the most useful topic upon which I could speak to the Empire Club today was to describe the scheme we are adopting in London, not with the view of telling business men in Canada what they should do or what they should not do, but merely conveying a piece of information about what we are doing in my own university, the University of London. I should feel myself entirely incompetent to advise or even make suggestions to so great a university authority as Sir Robert Falconer, the President of the University of Toronto, who sits on my right. It would be entirely unbecoming of me to do so, and I will therefore merely inform you of some facts that have come to our notice in London. If you find any inspiration or any help, any guidance at all, by drinking at our fountain of experience, we shall be happy, but don't suppose that I am in the slightest degree appearing to advise such up-to-date business men as those of Canada: (Laughter and applause.)

Now, among the problems of reconstruction of a world that has come down in ruins about our ears, undoubtedly at the present moment a great share of our activities must be given to the building up of the great sphere of international commerce once more. The great business men--men like Lord Randolph, the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Charles Geddes, the chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai. Corporation, and the other great merchants who do their work within the radius of a square mile in the city of London,--have felt that in the task of reconstruction their greatest need is to get young men who will be able to look at the problems of the world not with the narrow vision of a man whose sight is bounded by the walls of his own office, but with the greater vision, the trained vision, which has been built up, which has been helped in its growth, within the best educational institutions that we can find in the world.

Before the war, education and commerce were largely divorced from one another. The educationalist, by the ordinary law of supply and demand, fulfilled those demands that were made upon him, and generally looked, in the training' of the under-graduates that came to him in the university, toward the training that is meant for the professions-for the law, for medicine, for engineering, the church, etc. They did not look directly to the training of those men for the walks of commercial life; and on the other hand the business world, as a general rule, distrusted the university-trained man; they thought he was a narrow-minded person who had not an interest outside his books, having been trained by the professorial variety of the human species, which is mostly known by having long hair and leaving umbrellas in the train. (Laughter.). They did not, possibly, suppose that those men could have any vision, any broad outlook on world affairs.

Now, owing to the circumstances of the war, it has come about that the two worlds have come to understand each other rather better. During the war we had built up in England great new departments of the government for which we had no civil servants. We had to officer largely from the ranks of the academic people, departments requiring certain linguistic attainments as university men are the only men who have sufficient knowledge of foreign languages to be able to read German communiques in their own evil script. People could trust them; they were not going to serve their own ends; and the great Department of War Trade, the War Trade Intelligence Department, was almost entirely officered by my own colleagues in the world of history. (Applause.) The economists were stolen from the universities at such a rate that we could hardly carry on any academic teaching whatever. They were put to advising the amount of foodstuffs that should be imported, the amount of cotton, and where the cotton should be obtained-any number of duties were laid upon their shoulders, and unfortunately some of them have been stolen permanently. One of my colleagues, Professor Chapman, of the University of Manchester, has been stolen from the ranks of academic teaching to be Secretary of the Board of Trade. Unfortunately a good many other men who went into the life of civil servants have gone permanently away from the academic world.

In that process--because they met them upon committees, because they talked with them as man to man--the men in the world of business found that the university person was hardly such a purblind idiot as he had thought in the past; and the university man found that the business man, whom he thought such a narrow person that his only anxiety was making money, was as good a man as the university man of the highest type. Generally we have come into concert, we have worked together in our activities, to such an extent that no longer can it be said that we demand from the university man only an entrance into the profession. We also demand from him in some cases that he shall go into the world of business. In London the net result of all this was that in the months immediately preceding the armistice, when some of us thought the war was coming to an end fairly rapidly, and we thought that we should -have to undertake, the work of reconstruction at an early date, a committee was set up at the suggestion of the banking and mercantile community of the City of London, containing both the leaders of industry and some of the most presentable men in the university ranks, and there a scheme was worked out whereby the men could be trained to fill the highest positions in the mercantile world by the establishment of a commerce degree in the University of London. It is certain that any man who is to be appointed to such a position shall at any rate have had an academic training, shall at any rate have the best the university can offer him, so that there is a general idea that he can go into the world of finance or into the world of business and there show what he is made of, in his early years, instead of having to go through a very long apprenticeship in the lower grades before they can determine whether he is a good enough man to promote.

Now, outlining this scheme in detail, I would like you to note what purposes it is intended to serve. As I have said, one of the greatest problems of reconstruction, from this point of view, is the provision of a personnel for the management of our great industries. It is not a question only of internal trade, it is not only a question of trade within the British Empire; it is imperative, if we are to make up the wastage of war, that we shall find new sources of revenue outside of our own borders, for in foreign markets we shall be in bitterest competition with specialists of the most highly trained kind from the United States, from France, and at a later date from Germany. Every one of those specialists will have received in his own country an intensive training in commerce which we in England, at any rate, have hardly dreamed of up to the present. It behooves us, therefore, to meet them with their own weapons; and knowledge, we believe, in the future will be a far more potent lever in securing our rightful share of trade and commerce than we could ever secure by a placid resting upon our past reputation. (Hear, hear and applause.)

The University of London has a particular claim to assist in providing that personnel. The University of London is hardly enough heard of in the Empire as a whole. It is scattered widely in every part of the metropolis. It is of enormous size; it is of extreme complexity in organization because of the many tasks it has to fulfill; but gradually, as the work of the university is becoming known to our own people in London, that university is taking its rightful place and standing, because it is the university of the metropolis, and not because there is any particular merit in the men who officer it. It is standing out in its rightful position as one of the leaders in the university life of the Empire. It is therefore particularly right that in this matter, when a new venture has to be made, when we have to break away from the old precedents and work out into new, the University of London should be quite at the forefront of the new Empire.

In the scheme that I am about to describe to you I want you to realize clearly that it is by no means merely the product of the academic mind. At every turn, at every corner of it, we have had the help of the greatest men in our business community. Those men have told us what they want, what they believe their principal lieutenants shall possess in the way of education. When they have told us their demands, we from our technical knowledge have known best how to meet them; and from long, long experience-not experience of a personal kind only, but an experience that dates back to the last two or three hundred years over the commercial traditions of the city of London, and is a particularly long and closely-knit one from that fund of experience they are able to judge, as perhaps few mercantile bodies through the Empire are able to judge, what is really necessary to carry on a foreign trade successfully. And we do not say that this scheme is in any way a final one. We simply say that is a basis upon which in future the new edifice can be built. It is a beginning of commercial education upon larger lines than ever it has been done before.

Now, you will notice in what I have got to say, that I am saying absolutely nothing about office practice, nothing about shorthand, nothing about typewriting, very little about accountancy and bookkeeping, because as it seems to our great merchants, that is not the kind of education that they want the people to receive if they are going to be the great lieutenants in business. If you want to get a shorthand writer, a stenographer or typewriter, you want him to carry out your views and not his own; but if you want a man to come quite close to the head of the business you want someone with a greater vision. You can employ stenographers and typists comparatively easily; but for an executive you want someone with a broad matured outlook upon things, who is not afraid of taking responsibility, who is not afraid of embarking upon new lines; therefore we have left on one side those vocational subjects, those technical-tool subjects which can very well be learned by the man after he has got into the office.

By the way, I am not a professor of economics, I am not a professor teaching commerce; my part comes in because they want those people taught some broad outlook on history; that is where I come into the scheme; but in one of the committee's meetings it was said to me by a man at the head of one of the biggest shipping firms in the world, "I don't want a man to learn bookkeeping; the kind of bookkeeping they have in use schools is not the kind we have in our office; I would rather prefer that the man should not come in with a knowledge of bookkeeping at all, because any person of average intelligence can understand our system with great rapidity, and it is far better that he should learn the system that he is going to adopt in the office where that system has been worked out." Taking that into account, we academic people were left with a very much freer hand.

Our system of university education involves a three years' training for all our degrees. In the first of those years into which a man comes, having passed through the ordinary good school, and having passed our matriculation examination and gained the examination that is taken at the age of about seventeen and a halt, having passed through an ordinary good school he conks to us in the university and there gradually specializes. He does not specialize to any great extent in his first year; he begins his work upon the general line that he is going to carry on in the future. He specializes by either taking an arts course, a science course, a preliminary medical course, or a commerce course-as in this case. Sometimes he will have his arts degree before he takes his commerce course, but very frequently he may take commerce at the beginning. During that time, the first year, the subjects which lie generally around the main subject along which he is going to specialize at a later stage, and at the end of that year he takes what he calls the intermediate examinations, which test whether he has not merely attended the specific number of lectures that are prescribed for him, but test whether he has benefited by those lectures, whether he has a sufficient fund of knowledge to enable him to specialize satisfactorily along his own vocational line. Now, in commerce the intermediate curriculum which leads up to that intermediate examination is a rather interesting one.

A student in commerce has a certain number of obligatory subjects-subjects that he must take. First of all, he has to study the elements of economics. He has to study them from the theoretical point of view, and know something about what the masters of political economy said in the past. He has to study that in fair detail. Then, secondly, he has to study generally the outlines of banking, currency, trade,-which includes also transportation-and finance. Thirdly, he has to study foreign geography, because it is impossible to embark upon foreign trade, or even upon domestic trade, without knowing something about the countries from which the articles in which he trades have come. Fourthly, he either takes up accounting as applied to traders and trading companies, or in case he is going into banking and finance, and going into financial trade rather than entering upon the actual details of distributive industry, he has to study world industry, world history, with special reference to the 19th century. Those are obligatory subjects which every one has to take.

Then we begin to get to options. He must take an approved modern foreign language, a language other than his own. It is quite impossible for a man to enter into trade satisfactorily, even though he is only working in domestic trade, unless he has a knowledge and is able to read some language other than his own, and as conditions are now the languages from which he can choose comprise a very diversified list. The following is a list of them, and in reading this list I shall be apparently reading a list of some very out of the way languages, and you may ask, "How can you provide teaching in those languages?" As a digression, I might say that in the University of London we now have a full professorship, with all its apparatus behind it, or a lectureship in the case of the smaller languages, in every European language, with one exception. (Applause.) That exception is Albanian. We cannot have a lectureship in Albanian because the language is not yet written, but as soon as that language is written we shall have a lectureship in Albanian. Not merely that, but we also have the study with full apparatus of teaching, with definite classes at work. This is not in the air at all; there are classes really at work in most of the important languages of the east, constituting the School of Oriental Studies. The languages approved are as follows for the examination, but any other language may be submitted by the candidate providing it is approved. The languages are French, German, Modern Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian-all those have full professorships. Then, Polish, Arabic, these have a lectureship-Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay and Chinese-in which we have three full professors. (Applause.)

The candidate must take, at any rate, one of those. Then he may take another language; these men who are going into foreign trade will probably take two languages if they are going outside of the country as consuls, for very often this scheme, I may tell you, will prepare for entry to the new consular service. It allows a candidate to omit certain portions of the governmental examination if he has won our degrees. The second approved modern language would make way for science subjects providing he is going into the productive side of industry, that is to say, he is going to make this thing or that thing and the other, or at any rate he is going to sell the things that are made by the manufacturer of mechanical products--gramophones, sewing machines, bicycles, anything of that kind,--because we think a man in the selling part of that trade should know something of the sciences, chemistry, physics, biology, botany, mechanics, or applied mathematics. Or he may take the history of commerce, or he may take English if he is going into journalism, or lastly, if he is going into the advertising of those industries which deal with the production of art fabrics and that kind of thing, he may take commercial art as applied to an approved manufacture. At any rate, with those five subjects a certain degree of specialization is permitted, and he will have something of an equipment with which to begin his specialization in the latter part of his course.

Now, the latter part of his course occupies two year, and in those two years he narrows himself down to the actual subjects which work on the side of industry that he is going to take up. We have series of groups. The groups that are adopted are these: 1. Banking and Finance. 2. Trade, for those who wish to take colonial and general trade, and in certain cases distributing trades. Or, trade for those who wish to engage in the trade of a definite area, for example,' Brazil or India or China or Russia or Scandinavia. The next group is Industry, for those who wish to take up engineering and metal trades, distributing trades, and those engaged in works and factory management. Or, next, he may take up General Transport, for those who are either going to work in the administrative side of railways-I do not say the engineering side, but the mercantile side, the administrative side of railways-especially for those who are going to take up the Shipping trade, or Inland Transport, for those who are going to work in the operating departments of railways. Lastly, Public Utilities, for those who are specially engaged in the managing side of such undertakings as gas, electricity, hydraulic power, water supply and irrigation. Last of all, we have those who are going into the artistic side of trade, the designing trades, those that produce art fabrics, and so on, and we think that particular division will often be taken up by those who are also engaged in the distributing or retail trade; a man who is to, be the head of a great departmental store will then be very careful to know something about commercial art.

Now, whichever of those groups he takes up he must take certain obligatory subjects. First of all he has to take up the present organization of industry, banking, trade and transport. Even if a man is going to engage in the art business he ought to know something about the apparatus that he is going to use for distributing his commodities after he has produced them; and we therefore make it obligatory upon everybody that he understands something of the present organization of industry in general. We give him a breadth of view.

Secondly, he must take up modern economic development in other countries. Not; merely must he know something about the economic development in his own country, but he ought to know something of the economic development of the countries with which he will be a competitor.

Thirdly, he must take up the elements of commercial law, because in every business legal questions often come up. We do not say he wants a technical knowledge of law; for that he can go to his solicitor; but he ought to know something about the general outlines of law, and that will obviously save him from falling into considerable difficulty.

Lastly, we have a subject that is rather an unusual one in the universities up to the present time, but it is growing very largely in value because of the experience we have gained in the war-he must take up the statistical method, which includes averages of factors of production, and the method of scientific investigation of problems of distribution and sale.

I do not say he is going to be examined in all those subjects, but somewhere or other in. the last two years 'he will have a certain amount of, teaching of this kind of thing. If he is going to specialize to become an academic teacher of any of those he will necessarily have to investigate them with a great deal more completeness; but some insight into that side of things will be given to him somewhere in his course.

Now, I am not going, in detail, into the actual prospectus for those who take up these various subjects from A to I, but I think it may be interesting to go into the details of one of them, or perhaps two of them if I have time. I think I have just time for one-the details of banking and finance. This is of great interest to us in England, in London especially, because London is still undoubtedly the financial centre of the world. (Hear, hear and applause.) Within four walls, and not for the purpose of the reporters, I may tell you something that was said to me a few nights ago. I was dining, in the privacy of his own house, with a New York financier of considerable eminence, who had one or two other people there, and talking to him on the problem of exchange, I said to him-with my tongue in my cheek-"Obviously, New York and the United States are now the centre of the world's banking and finance system." He says, "Are they?" He said, "When we take a holiday, London goes on without minding; when London takes a holiday, we sit and twiddle our thumbs." (Laughter and applause.)

Now, in the banking and commerce group the subjects prescribed are these: An approved modern foreign language-not involving the grammatical study of it, but the use of it as a tool-subject, involving the colloquial use of it, and especially the colloquial use as applied to the industry that the man is going to take up. He has to be able to read, with really a considerable amount of facility, everything that is written in that language about his own subject; he has to be able to write essays in that language, and commercial letters in that language on his own subjects, and he has to be able to take a viva-voce examination with an examiner who really does know something about it. We in London are rather peculiar in that way; my university has always kept high standards, and we are not going to have people who are merely pretending to do this, that and the other; they have to do it pretty well. Then we have, in this course, banking, including a general knowledge of the principal British and foreign systems and of stock exchange practice and the foreign exchanges. Next we have accounting and business organizations, accounts of traders at home and abroad, including foreign currencies and accounts of branches, the organization of business houses of various types, which will be studied to a certain extent within mercantile establishments that are willing to receive candidates.

And now, lastly, just let me say this. For the purpose of carrying on that study we do not insist that a man shall relinquish all connection with trade or industry, shall come and cloister himself in academic seclusion--because we have not got any academic seclusion in London; it is rather like living in a great railway station to work in that London college; but from our very earliest days, and that is about eighty or ninety years ago, we have always provided for the candidate who was open to earn his own living at the same time as he was studying for a university degree. We have therefore provided that practically all the teaching in those subjects shall be conducted after office hours. Very many of those men, thanks to the generosity of their employers, will be working in the business houses and great banks and corporations part of the day; they will come on to us in the late afternoon, and will study with us in the early evening during term time, ten weeks and eight weeks-those are our terms; and during the other part of the year they will have time for their own reading; but they will be living in the atmosphere in which they must always work; they will not get out of touch with those men who are going to command them in future; they will be in close touch with them. It has already happened in some cases that a large commercial company would say to its men, "Take a year off; go and work in the university the whole of your time, and get in contact with your subject, then come back for your second and third or fourth years, as the case may be,".-because sometimes men who are working so hard, after working over their studies, go back for their third or fourth years and work in the office part of the time and work in the university the other part of the time; and I am glad to say that that plan is working with the greatest satisfaction. I told you at the beginning that this was a new precedent. I don't know that I was quite correct in saying that. In my own college in the University of London, King's College, we have had for many years what are called the Gilbert lectures in banking; those lectures were endowed in the year 1860, I think; they are given to 600 or 700 bank clerks every year, men working in the banks in the daytime, and working with us in the evening. The results produced by those banking lectures have been entirely satisfactory to the banks, so much so that very few men have got promotion in the London banks unless they have attended those lectures. Certain of the problems relating to transportation are nothing new to us; we have been having men from the offices of the great railways working in our ranks in this evening fashion for a good long while, and very often having the managers of the great railways to teach them, and so on.

Into this course that I am now describing some 400 men have made their entries this last October. They are coming in such numbers that we find it very hard to secure the people to teach them. I came away from London seven or eight weeks ago, and I cannot say how this thing is going, but we rarely embark in this kind of work without having it thought out pretty well, and from what I know of the community of London and the people who are taking this course it is by no means a project in the air; it is a real actual project going on at the present moment. If by means of it we can educate those men with broad vision, who will look at the trade and industry of the world as a whole, and not at the particular little problems of their own firm, I for one have no doubt that Britain, in the long run, will again place herself in the position that seemed jeopardized for a little while, but about which we really had no fear at the bottom of our hearts; she will again return to the proud position of the first commercial power on the globe. (Loud applause.)

PRESIDENT STAPELLS : Gentlemen, I do not know what Sir Robert Falconer will say in presenting the thanks of this Club to our distinguished guest, but I want to say that this address has made one blind business man see a great many things, and I think it had the same effect upon the business men who are facing me. I will ask Sir Robert Falconer now to present the thanks of the Club to Dr. Newton. (Applause.)

SIR ROBERT FALCONER: Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, your applause has already shown the appreciation that you have, and that I am sure we all have, for this very clear, cogent and stimulating address that has been delivered by Professor Newton; and I am sure I may formally express to him, on your behalf, that we have listened to him, not only with much appreciation, but also with very much thankfulness by reason of his having told us that London is so full of energy and so full of vision as he has just announced. (Hear, hear.) Professor Newton, coming from the heart of things as he does, and coming directly, has been able to put before us in a personal way this project, which a good many of us have been studying from afar, and his visit cannot fail to be of immense advantage to us, I am very sure. I hope also that his visit will be of advantage to him in his future work when he returns to London, so that having gone round the Empire, and having seen the United States also, he will become one of those living links who are so necessary for us if we are to have this new world unified in order to do its best work. (Applause.) It is a matter of pride and thankfulness to us that London is maintaining her position (Loud applause.) and we hope that the great University of London will rise to greater power. It should be the greatest university in the world. I happen to be a member of London myself, but in the old days, when it was an external examination. I had to take it and study elsewhere. London has never hitherto taken the position that she should have taken academically, for various reasons. The parts of the university have been scattered. Attempts have been made to bring them together, and I believe they are coming together as never before, and now there are opportunities to the world at large and to the Empire afforded by London which I believe will put her where she ought to be. We, as Canadians, must be very proud to know of those steps that are being taken; and here is another indication of the vitality that is there. Our students should be drawn to London more and more in order that they may get that group work.

In the University of Toronto we have been studying this wonderful scheme that Professor Newton outlined, and a committee of the Senate has already resolved to recommend that a degree of Bachelor of Commerce should be established in the University of Toronto. (Applause.) We are studying this course, which naturally is very much more comprehensive than anything that could be attempted in Toronto, the variety of interests in London is so very great, the industries are so different, and it stands at the centre of the world. I believe that our university, without necessarily following precisely on the lines of London University, will be able very soon to present a course or courses which will give new opportunities to the young men in this new period. Most of you know, but some of you are not aware of the fact, that for many years we have been turning out a number of highly trained men in the department of Commerce and Finance. That is an honors course, however, that is only for the very few. You can go to New York and various places and find men who have taken that course holding very high positions. But that has not met the need, and the desire has been entertained for something wider in the way of providing for education in commerce, and from a variety of sources this need has been pressed in upon us, and I hope something will be forthcoming.

But now that I am on my feet I will say that this Club and this city should take their share in enabling us to make a course like this a success. (Hear, hear and applause.) You cannot ask one side to do the whole thing, and one of the needs of this community and this country is a chair of Geography. (Hear, hear.) There is not one in this Dominion. (Hear, hear.) I approached the Board of Trade last summer in the hope that they might see their way to enter upon such an undertaking with us. I am afraid the Board of Trade has not seen its way yet; but why should not the Empire Club, together with the Board of Trade, endeavor to secure for the University of Toronto a first-class chair of Geography? We are overwhelmed in the university with demands of all sorts, for buildings and everything else; the pressure is enormous, and the government probably might not be able to give us some of these things; but a chair of this kind, which is essential if such a course as this is to be effective, will bear at once upon a community like this. Let me give you an example of that. You read the other day in the newspapers that the British West Indies are gradually drawing closer and closer to the United States. What will that mean? We from Canada, and perhaps we from Britain-how many of our people in this Dominion have had their eyes open to the West Indies as an outlet for trade of this country? Very few indeed, I think. That is only one example. If we had a chair of Geography turning out men, or illuminating men with a vision of what lies not far off in commerce, it would be of immense service. I believe, therefore, that the returns that would come in from the help that you could give in enabling us to strengthen a course, if we undertake to do this kind of thing, would soon be very widely felt; and what would it mean to this immense city to provide $4,000 or $5,000 a year for a chair of Geography? The city makes very little return to the university for the $3,000,000 in cold cash that is spent in it every year; and we are worth more than that in cold cash every year to this city; that is a very low calculation. But what would $3,000 or $4,000 be to the university? It would return to the city many-fold. The second point is this: suppose by this new course of Commerce and Finance, we were able to train men-as we have done in the past-for the consular servicemen who are to be the eyes of Canada abroad; if Canada is to get foreign trade we must have a fine consular service, well trained, I will guarantee that we will do that training for you, and we will soon turn out men just as well trained as you could meet abroad. We have the equipment up there for languages-Spanish and French and all the rest of them; not all this list that Dr. Newton has read, but the ones that we need for Canada and in other ways. But will you guarantee that those up-to-date men who have perhaps taken the languages course with us and a good long training, will get, at the end of that, a decent position abroad after they have had that training? (Applause.) Will you see that Ottawa pays enough salary in foreign parts to those young men to make it worth their while to go into consular service? (Hear, hear.) It is not the part of the university to see to that; that is for you to see to-to see that if we turn out that class of man, the highly trained Canadian, who will be able to take his place along with consuls from other countries, good positions will be open for those men abroad so that they will be able to return to you the worth of their fine training. Today, things are not as they ought to be in that respect. Those are the only two things-the chair of Geography and the consular service -I will mention today, and I will sit down, thanking you for the opportunity of speaking and returning thanks to the speaker for his fine address. (Loud applause.)