Co-operation Between Great Britain and Canada

Dr. Shipley, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

MR. VICE-PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN, The warmth of your reception especially from behind-for I am sitting in front of the hottest radiator I have ever struck, has rather overwhelmed me. I am asked to speak to a most distinguished gathering of citizens of no mean city. My avocations have not taken me very largely into the business of the world; in fact, such excursions as I have made into that department have been dead failures. However, one or two things I would like to say about the relations of the highly trained graduate to the business world. There are men-more men than you would believe-who would not walk across this room to take up a fortune if that fortune depended on them having to be bothered by taking care of it. I dare say you do not often strike those men. I will give you an example: The first student in my college that went over the channel to fight the enemy was such a man. He was devoted to poetry-he was not a bad

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The British Educational Mission: Arthur Shipley, ViceChancellor of the University of Cambridge, Master of Christ College; Sir Henry Miers, formerly of the University of London, now Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester; Rev. Edward N. Walker, Librarian of the University of Oxford; Sir Henry Jones, representing the Glasgow University; Dr. John Joly, representing Trinity College, Dublin,

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poet-and to literature. He was an extraordinarily good linguist. When he left the University I placed him as a special editor of one of the most distinguished weeklies, "Country Life in England"; and he chucked it in two years and wanted to go abroad to see the world and to listen to some music. Well, he went. and saw the world and listened to a lot of music, and incidentally he learned to speak five European languages, and he was so confoundedly cultivated that he was becoming a public nuisance when the War began. That young man, who was, as I say, a poet, rather than an athlete, threw himself into the Army Service Corps, the one branch of the army which he had any chance to get into, and he flung himself there in August, 1914, and by November he was over the lines, living a life half way between a railway guard and a grocer. He was all through the Ypres business for two years, and his knowledge of one of the most difficult languages to know well, and incomparably the easiest to speak badly-Italian,-was such that he was taken into the Intelligence Department of the War Office in the third year of the War, to write books in Italian,-highly specialized books,-for the Italian soldiers on awfully fine gunnery and all those various activities with which we were trying to help.

Now that is an example of a young fellow who really did not care twopence about making money; but of course, as I say, he is the exception; but he is so exceptional that I thought you would like to be introduced to him-a very gallant young fellow, who sacrificed more, I think, than most fellows sacrificed, because if there was anyone that hated the conditions under which he was living, it was he; and unfortunately he lost his best friend within the first three months of the War. I had written over to him about one of the men, and he said "Now that so-and-so has gone, what does anything matter."

Now for a few minutes I will turn my attention to what I do know about the business men and the highly trained graduate. I have been in the habit of coming over this Atlantic for more years than I care to remember. It was in 1887 1 first crossed your continent, and coming over here about two years since, I did learn in New York one or two things-that was that Wall Street was largely managed by college graduates. Now, in my own University I don't know that the graduates amounted to anything very much; they became usually either Clergymen of the Church of England, or school masters, and the outlook financially was tolerably poor. I saw these rather clever boys taking up the profession of teaching, which they often left between the thirties and the forties, and there was very little future for them, and I thought, if an American graduate can make good at business, why should not I? So with the help of Sir Nicholas Shaw I started what we called an Appointments Board at Cambridge. You can imagine how unpopular that was. They said we were money grubbing

they said we were commercial; finally they said we were unacademic. Of course, that is the last word in guilt. However, we forwarded our plan, because we sent our secretaries to interview the magnates of London. We found the Navy a much harder proposition to crack, but we are doing it. We started with London, and except that the few of those eminent merchants recollected that Cambridge is on the road to Newmarket, they had not the vaguest idea as to what Cambridge was or where it was, or what we wanted by coming to them. Still we had some success, and this success grew early, so that whereas during the first year we succeeded in placing thirty young men in business careers, the last year before the War we placed 400, and we could have placed, I think, a thousand, if we had had them.

We go on two very clear principles. We do not take one penny from the applicant for the post. We say to him quite frankly, "We have a post which we think will suit you"-and we know our young men much better than any of the great Universities-when I say great, I mean large, not old-because we live next door to them, on the staircase with them, and we can get a knowledge of them in the three or four years they spend up there, greater than you can get in the great Universities where the students are more scattered. We say to them, "We think we have the post, but you are under no obligation; we do not take any percentage of your first year's income, as the commercial agencies do." We say the same thing to the employer. "We have no interest in recommending you a man who is not the best man, we think, for that post."

I was sitting for five years on a commission on the Civil Service. This Royal Commission came to an end shortly after the War began, but during its course it took evidence on the University training to business, and one gentleman who came before us, a Mr. Robert Cohen, who was engaged with a large group of cosmopolitan financiers on the other side of the Atlantic, fighting a gentleman who was called over here J.D.-at any rate this young man was a graduate, and he said "If I am going to fight anybody with the brains of Mr. Rockefeller, I must have brains to do it with, and where can I get them?" "Well," he thought, "I will go to my own University." To cut a rather long story short he gave before the Royal Commission the following evidence: "We started only a few years ago"-I think it was eight or ten-"and we have now in our employment, running all along the south coast of Asia and down to Australia and up to Yokahama, with agencies at all the principal seaports, forty-two men under thirty years of age--forty-two men earning $5,000 a year, and one is only 28, and is earning $17,000 a year at Yokahama." And he added, "Now, everyone of those men are first-class honour men from Oxford or Cambridge." As he was a Cambridge man, the great majority of them, I think it was forty, were Cambridge men, because that was his college, and he knew the personnel there, and the other two came from Oxford. Now I want to be perfectly clear that I am not saying this because I happen to represent Cambridge. I represent the nation on this Commission, but it did so happen, and I think that if he had been an Oxford man the numbers would have been reversed. At any rate, there were those young men in an honourable career.

We had on that commission a very well known Laborman named Philip Snowden, who, for some reason I never could fathom, disliked old Universities. He used to say "Why don't you teach the new subjects?" I said, "What are they?" He said, "Brewing at Burton on Trent, textile factories at Bradford, and dyeing at Leeds." I said "Well, Mr. Snowden, they are not new; textile fabrics came in with the Garden of Eden; brewing was undoubtedly known to the northern men; and as to dyes, it is one of the oldest of the human industry." I used to say to Mr. Snowden "The new subjects, sir, are Biochemistry and School Physics, and Psychiatry, and any long name that I can remember; they are not only taught at the Universities, but they were invented there." Mr. Snowden had a particular objection which he shares with Mr. Carnegie, to the Classics, and he once asked Mr. Cohen in what branch these forty-two gentlemen had been educated, thinking he would say, "Science," and possibly "A few in Law" and possibly "A few in Economics"; but he. said "I didn't care what they were trained by; what I wanted was a trained brain; but I was sure somebody would ask that question, so I brought the list down; the majority of those forty-two, more than half, were trained in Classics; a quarter of them in Mathematics; and the remainder, less than a quarter, were educated in the Sciences, in Law, and I think one or two in Oriental Languages. But that is the point, gentlemen; it is not what you are educated in, it is whether you have a trained brain. Education is not, as Mr. Snowden thought, a knowledge of facts; it is the thing that gives a man the power to take the initiative, power to be resolute, to hang on when other fellows fall, and above all, it gives him a certain vision; and I know nothing in the whole world that seems to me to need a new vision more than the great world of commerce-the man who can foresee; and mind you, as Sir Henry Meyers has reminded us, the business men and political economists have not foreseen successfully; there was not one of them in my country who did not say this War could not last more than six months because of the financial strain. Well, business men of that particular kind, and political economists have failed us. After all, as Sir Walter Bagehot said, in one of his essays, "No one really grieves when a political economist dies."

Sir Henry Jones, of the University of Glasgow

Mr. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN, I really don't know which of my great storehouses of learning to open out, or which tap to turn on. If I were to follow the example so frequently set by my fellow delegate, I would have nothing worth saying, and , I would have to exaggerate the good things that he has already said. For instance, he said that there was some great quarter of the worldI forget which it was-in which there were forty Cambridge men, Englishmen mostly, I suppose, but is there any quarter of the world in which he would not say there are forty Scotchmen. But I do not want to quarrel with him for I have to live with him. We are entertained so kindly on the present occasion, I understand, by a club which is deeply interested in the unity of the Empire. I wonder if I were to ask you if you could tell me what is that cement, as we may call it, which is strong enough and is likely to be strong enough in the future to stand all the beating of storms and difficulties in the social world. What is the nature of the social cement? I suppose the chemists here would tell its what cement would keep stones together, but what is the cement that keeps citizens together as loyal members of the same state? And especially, what kind of international cement shall we invent, by thinking at the Universities and elsewhere, that will prevent the nations from again breaking asunder and quarrelling with one another? Commerce will draw us together, industries will enable us to supply one another's needs; but I am not quite sure that the ties of industries and commerce, close as they are, making one people dependent upon another, are of themselves sufficient to hold us together always. We can supply one another's needs fairly, and still quarrel. There will be future wars-or may be. But who is thinking out the ultimate conditions of social unity and harmony between nations? How are you going to create a more harmonious working between Capital and Labour? What kind of cement shall we have there? It is puzzling us a good deal in the Old Country. I would like very much if the inventive minds of those who are one with us in flesh and bone would turn more to those invisible but powerful social forces that bring men into conflict and that also can bind them together in a new way. That is one thing.

Looking back, for instance, how is it that the British Empire has disappointed Germany so much by not breaking tip under pressure? There is some of that cement. I need not waste your time in describing the expectation the Germans had that our colonies would fly at our throats and so on. Instead of that their loyalty has been marvelous. But I think I know what it is, and I think perhaps my fellow commissioners will allow me to tell a story I have told once already about the extraordinary beauty and unexpectedness of that loyalty for our Empire exhibiting itself in remote parts. My eldest son, who has been a prisoner in Turkey till last week--he is a prisoner there yet, but I hope he is a free man by now--was an assistant commissioner far up the River Irriwaddy in Burma, in a most remote district, at the beginning of the War. He was about the only white man in his district, and he was responsible for practically everything there in the way of government, and there was a great big district of 700 square miles into which none of the other commissioners had ever penetrated. He went there just to see what they were about. They have the patriarchal system in Burma, and we make use of it; we do not destroy native systems, but we respect them if they are of any use; we do not try to pour our native populations into our own mould according to the fashion of Germany, or impose by force our own culture upon them. Oh no; whatever kind of religion has the elements of purity and value in it, whatever social institution has any uplift in it, although by association with our own it may seem to us to be very odd, we make the most of it. So we make the most of the patriarchal system there. The old Patriarch came and paid his taxes; and after he paid his taxes to my boy a conversation to the following effect took place. "Is it true, that our King is in difficulties with some German highway robbers?" "Yes, quite true," he replied. The Patriarch said "Well, I have five guns in my district of 700 square miles,"-my boy knew those guns. If you put a double charge of powder in them, they will carry fifty yards, and, at 100 yards, they are about as dangerous atone end as the other; for they are the guns supplied by our merchant princes to the natives. You don't do things like that in Canada, do you? "Well," said the old man to my boy, "behind these five guns I can put five dead shots, and I will be delighted to lend them to King George." Loyalty like a little flower, growing far, far away-genuine loyalty. Why? I will tell you why: because we respect, and our civil servants respect, the native populations. They give justice to the utmost of their ability to the native population; they respect their institutions; and what is the result? These principles of justice, fair-play, respect for personality,--these are the things that act as cement and bind the nations together.

I will tell you this-which you know perfectly well--however indispensable we become to one another in industry and commerce, we shall not have a secure Empire nor a secure world until the principles of justice are respected, and every man respects his neighbour too much to take him in, to make a fortune at his expense. It is the fight for material wealth that I am afraid of. This dissipates rather than binds, and I want our modern communities' inner life to be lifted up to the level of our boys who are fighting for great ends, and not for themselves.

Sir Henry Miers, of the University of Manchester

I only wish, for your sake and my own, I could be as brief as the literary man who was unexpectedly called upon to reply to the toast of Literature, and rising to his subject said "Hamlet is dead, Dante is Dead, Shakespeare is dead, and I am not feeling very well myself." You expect me, I take it, to say something more than that. I will just say this, or since coming to Canada you have made us feel more than ever that we are not strangers in a foreign country, that you are what we may call our brothers. This luncheon of itself makes me feel somewhat at home, for in our own Universities, which I more or less represent,-the newer Universities,-at several of them a luncheon club like this has been instituted in connection with the University, simply because people have been over here and have seen its enormous success in this country.

In the papers, as we have travelled over the United States, we have often been described as the British Educators. I should much rather we should be described as the British Learners, because we came here not to teach anybody, but to learn for ourselves; and one of the truths not widely enough appreciated is, that every teacher, to be a good teacher, must also be a learner; he must take his student by the hand and with him explore the fields of knowledge. We shall have plenty of opportunities of being educators when we return home, and we shall be able to tell them, I think, the possibilities that exist in Canada as well as in the States.

This is my fourth visit to Canada, and I always regard the first visit I paid here as a very important stage of my own education; for I travelled across from England at that time with the Canadian Contingent which had been taking part in the first jubilee processions in London, and I got an opportunity of meeting men from all parts of Canada, and seeing the awakening of that spirit of devotion to the Empire which was then more than at any other time, I think, expressing itself more forcibly than ever before. The foundations were then laid of that union between the Mother Country and the Dominions which have born such ample fruit in the last few years. I have always felt since then, and often said that every British Member of Parliament ought to be sent around the Empire, and that every worker of any sort in national work in Great Britain ought to be made to see something of the Empire. Those who are concerned with mining, agriculture, forestry and everything else, should come here and see for themselves what is being done here, and the pioneer spirit in which the problems are dealt with here. They would thus get that education which they would never otherwise receive.

In 1912 a conference took place in which I was personally concerned. It was an attempt to bring together the Universities of the Empire. The conference took place in London, and was the first of the sort in which the Universities of the whole Empire met together, and all the Canadian Universities were represented there. They met together to try to act together in the future in the way of promoting what we are so much concerned with now--more frequent intercourse, more frequent interchange between students and teachers, between the Dominions and the Mother Country. It was to have met again in 1917, but the War interfered with that. I hope it will meet again soon, and that the process of enabling and encouraging this more frequent intercourse between the Universities of the Empire will be carried into full effect.

My last visit to Canada was on the occasion of an international congress in which every one that took part in it-and many here did, I think-will remember that there, as in all the international congresses, the Germans were in evidence in a proportionate number, and endeavoured by force of numbers and domination to obtain supremacy in all those international conferences. It will be a long time, I take it, before an international congress of that kind takes place again. The surprising thing is that all the information that they obtained at those times, they learned for the purpose of War in the future; and another surprising thing is that with all that penetration that was going on, the Germans did not display much mental penetration. Every one feels that now-they did not understand the countries they visited.

I hope our mission to the United States-there is no need of our regarding ourselves as carrying on some mission here-will be to bring the inhabitants of that great country into the great Anglo-Saxon fraternity. So far as academic matters are concerned, at any rate, we hope and believe in the future there will be laid academic friendships, that mutual knowledge will be increased, that we will all be able to pull together for the common cause of Anglo-Saxon civilization. We want to know on this side what the Americans want from us; we want to know what we can give them; and we want to see how we can send some of our students across to the States and receive some of their students in our colleges. Speaking of our visit to the States as well as to the other parts of the Empire, we want those visits to take place at the impressionable period of life that will never be forgotten afterwards, and I feel there is going to be a great benefit in this mutual interchange of students and teachers.

Among the benefits of this great War which I hope will more than compensate for all the horrors produced, and all the evils it has caused, I believe will be this, that though the flower and the strength of Great Britain and the Dominions have been sacrificed, one result of that great struggle will be a more free and more frequent circulation of the youth and strength of the Empire. Circulation is the true life-blood of the Empire throughout the ages.