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 The Immortal Memory 
 
 Speech Delivered by 
 
 Mr. Tohn Foord 
 
 j «\ 
 
 at the Annual Dinner of the 
 
 Burns Society of the City of New York 
 
 at Delmonico's 
 
 January 25, 191 6 
 
 minium 
 
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"The Immortal Memory' 
 
 Speech Delivered by Mr. John Foord at the Annual Dinner 
 
 of the Burns Society of the City of New York at 
 
 Delmonico's, January 25, 1916. 
 
 "Burns, thou should'st be living at this hour; the world 
 hath need of thee !" So might we paraphrase Wordsworth's 
 invocation to Milton, forgetting that Burns is living at this 
 hour; that his spirit is a vital force in the minds and 
 hearts of many more thousands of his fellow-men than he 
 ever addressed in his lifetime. In the trenches on the far- 
 flung battle-line, and on the grim guardians of Britain's sea 
 power, the very tones of his voice have sounded to-day in 
 the ears of tens of thousands of the men in whose hands 
 rests the future of human freedom. So, in all the years 
 in which we have celebrated the birthday of Robert Burns, 
 there has been none in which the undying and indestructi- 
 ble influence of the man we honor has been so manifest 
 as it is at this present hour. Throughout all the years in 
 which a response has been made to "The Immortal Mem- 
 ory" there has been none in which the message he de- 
 livered to Scotland and the world bore so intimate a 
 relation to the cause of liberty which he so passionately 
 loved, and to the service of that human brotherhood which 
 was the thinker's inspiration and the poet's dream. For 
 this man was not only the greatest of Scotsmen; he was 
 Scotland's epitome, and the spirit that animates the Briton 
 of to-day is one that was born and nurtured among the 
 hills and straths of Caledonia. The most imperative of 
 its moods is a sentiment finer than any that springs merely 
 from the sense of duty, broader than is derived from the 
 love of home, — a sentiment that is informed by the 
 enthusiasm of humanity and quickened by the divine ardor 
 at whose prompting man stands ready to die for man, 
 
 "to venture life and love and youth, 
 For the great prize of death in battle." 
 
 In this cataclysm of which we are awe-struck spectators, 
 in which all that is fiendish, no less than all that is godlike, 
 
in our common humanity stands revealed, men and nations 
 have stripped themselves of the disguises they had grown 
 accustomed to wear. The savage, heretofore masquerading 
 under the cloak of "kultur," stands forth plain savage, with 
 all his primal instincts unmodified and unrefined, naked 
 and unashamed. On the other hand, in the practical, 
 prudent and peace-loving descendant of generations of 
 born fighters, there has been awakened the tingling joy of 
 combat that his fathers knew, and because of the priceless 
 boon of independence that is his native heritage, there has 
 come to him the stern resolve, if die he must, to die the 
 death of a freeman, struggling that those who come after 
 him may be free. 
 
 This is the Scottish spirit that found its noblest expres- 
 sion and its most characteristic interpretation in the poetry 
 of Burns. Centuries went to the making of the impulses 
 which culminated in the genius of Scotland's own inspired 
 bard, and while Scottish blood courses in the veins of 
 men there never will be a time when the echoes of his 
 voice will fail to produce a sympathetic throb in the Scot- 
 tish heart or to lend a new and fervid quickening to the 
 motions of the Scottish mind. His nature held no deeper 
 or stronger feeling than that of devotion to the memory 
 of the heroes who had led his country's long struggle for 
 independence. As a boy he explored every den and dell of 
 the Leglen wood which had sheltered Sir William Wallace, 
 with as much enthusiasm he said as ever pilgrim felt 
 toward Loretto. Even then his heart glowed with a wish 
 to be able to make a song on Wallace — a wish unfulfilled 
 save for this noble stanza: 
 
 "At Wallace' name what Scottish blood 
 But boils up in a spring-time flood! 
 Oft have our fearless fathers strode 
 
 By Wallace' side, 
 Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, 
 
 Or glorious died." 
 
 But who shall say that, in its largest sense, the wish was 
 not fulfilled when he gave to the world "Scots wha hae' 
 wi' Wallace bled" — the greatest war-ode ever penned by 
 man? 
 While the martial note is by no means the dominant one 
 
in the poetry or the songs of Robert Burns, they are 
 interpenetrated with the love of freedom. And that is true 
 of all our Scottish singers. In the very dawn of our 
 national poetry, in the fourteenth century, John Barbour, 
 the Archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote one of the noblest 
 panegyrics on freedom to be found in any literature — free- 
 dom without which "a noble heart may have nane ease," 
 "freedom mair to prize than all the gold in warld that is." 
 The same note was struck by Dunbar, Blind Harry, Robert 
 Henryson and Gavin Douglas in the morning of Scottish 
 song, as loudly and clearly as it was by Burns in its high 
 noon. In this fervent love of freedom, the Scottish poets 
 of all the centuries join hands, simply because they were 
 Scotsmen, and to have had any sentiment out of accord 
 with that one would have marked them as unworthy of 
 their motherland. Sir Walter expresses the passion in its 
 purest and most exalted terms ; lesser men like Henry 
 Scott Riddell in its most aggressive, as thus: 
 
 "They tell o' lands wi' brighter skies, 
 
 Where freedom's voice ne'er rang; 
 Gie me the hills where Ossian lies, 
 
 And Coila's minstrel sang; 
 For I've nae skill o' lands, my lads, 
 
 That kenna to be free; 
 Then Scotland's right and Scotland's might 
 
 And Scotland's hills for me." 
 
 In like vein is Robert Nicoll's : 
 
 "Where the caller breezes sweep 
 Across the mountain's breast, 
 Where the free in soul are nurst 
 Is the land that we lo'e best." 
 
 But why multiply examples? The truth I am proclaim- 
 ing is a commonplace to every Scotsman here, because we 
 imbibed the passion for liberty with our mother's milk. 
 Burns had it before he read as a boy the paraphrase of 
 Blind Harry's Story of Wallace, which he says "poured a 
 tide of Scottish prejudice into his veins which will boil 
 there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest." He 
 had it, too, like most men of his race in all the ages, 
 closely associated with a deep and abiding love for the 
 
land of his birth. It was from his heart that the invoca- 
 tion came: 
 
 "O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 
 
 For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
 Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 
 Be bless'd with health, and peace, and sweet content !" 
 
 And from the heart, too, most emphatically came the 
 avowal : 
 
 "Even then a wish, I mind its power, 
 A wish that to my latest hour 
 
 Shall strongly heave my breast, 
 That I, for puir auld Scotland's sake 
 Some usefu' plan or book could make, 
 
 Or sing a sang at least !" 
 
 "Or sing a sang at least!" It seemed to him as if he 
 could do so little for his country, and yet he would gladly 
 have done all. Quite unconsciously, however, he was doing 
 to his native land, to the United Kingdom, to the British 
 Empire that was then, and that was to be, a service not less 
 enduring than that of the men who were piloting the bark 
 of state through the most stormy and perilous time of 
 all its history. The achievement of the statesmen must be 
 reckoned incomparably a greater one than the writing of 
 a song, but the fame of the song-writer may stand the 
 ordeal of time better than that of the statesman, if the 
 song have in it a spirit that never dies. Strange as it 
 would have sounded in their own time, the tenant farmer 
 of Mossgiel, the gauger at Dumfries, supplies in the hour 
 of his country's need to-day an inspiration which nor Pitt, 
 nor Fox, nor Burke, nor Sheridan can provide. There 
 might seem to be a touch of the miraculous in that, were 
 it not a familiar fact in human experience that the forces 
 which move the world are those that strongly and deeply 
 move men's souls. 
 
 It was from his heart and soul that Burns wrote; no 
 poet ever spoke in tones of such perfect sincerity; no 
 poet ever subordinated himself so absolutely to the desire 
 he had to serve, as best he could, his native land. Burns 
 did not stop to inquire how much or how little his native 
 land had done for him, still less to try to drive a bargain 
 with her on the principle of give and take. It was enough 
 
for him that this was the land of his fathers, and that he 
 was the heir of her glorious memories ; nay, even a humble 
 successor of those nameless old song-writers who could 
 feel so strongly and describe so well; enough for him that 
 he had been born amid 
 
 "Auld Coila's plains and fells, 
 Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, 
 Her banks and braes, her dens and dells, 
 
 Where glorious Wallace 
 Aft bure the gree, as story tells 
 
 Frae southron billies." 
 
 Here was a land that a man might proudly die for, if 
 need were, but to which the best immediate service that a 
 rustic bard could render was to conserve her native music, 
 and add to the store of her treasure-house of song. And 
 so, for the mere love of the thing, and without fee or 
 reward, ungrudgingly he worked day and night for the last 
 nine years of his life to furnish appropriate words for the 
 old airs of Scotland, and he died with the pen in his hand. 
 
 He was keenly aware that there was much in the political 
 institutions of Great Britain, particularly in what he called 
 "a system of corruption between the executive power and 
 the representative part of the legislature," that urgently 
 needed amendment. He said this in reply to a reproof for 
 overmuch freedom of speech that had been administered to 
 him by his employers, the Board of Excise, and he took the 
 risk it involved for this among other reasons : "I have 
 three sons, who I see already have brought into the world 
 souls ill qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves." But that 
 did not tend to weaken the fierce outburst of patriotic 
 fervor of his lines to the Dumfries volunteers, where his 
 differentiation only makes his defiance of Britain's foes 
 more energetic: 
 
 "The kettle o' the kirk and state 
 
 Perhaps a claut may fail in't; 
 But deil a foreign tinkler loon 
 
 Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
 Our fathers' bluid the kettle bought 
 
 And wha wad dare to spoil it 
 By Heaven ! the sacrilegious dog 
 
 Shall fuel be to boil it." 
 
That may not be great poetry, but it is the embodiment 
 of sober patriotic sense, and has the sound of a trumpet 
 call to battle. But the strain is of a higher mood that has 
 rung in the ears of the tens of thousands of Scotsmen 
 who have flocked to the colors so that their percentage of 
 enlistment became the highest in the British Empire: 
 
 "By oppression's woes and pains, 
 By your sons in servile chains, 
 We will drain our dearest veins 
 
 But they shall be free. 
 Lay the proud usurpers low! 
 Tyrants fall in every foe! 
 Liberty's in every blow! 
 
 Let us do, or die !" 
 
 To the humblest of the Scottish recruits these lines were 
 familiar as household words : to the least devout of them 
 it was second nature to say with the man who was in- 
 spired to write them: "So may God defend the cause of 
 truth and liberty as he did that day." 
 
 And here we strike the larger theme — "The cause of 
 truth and liberty," which embraces indeed your country's 
 independence and your own freedom, but to which con- 
 ceivably your heart and soul may be dead when it tran- 
 scends the area of your local patriotism. It is strongly 
 characteristic of Burns that his enthusiasm for liberty 
 owned no such narrow limitations. The man who could 
 proclaim himself the "poor, earth-born companion an' 
 fellow-mortal" of the field-mouse, whose heart could feel 
 a pang for "the ourie cattle, or silly sheep wha bide this 
 brattle o' winter war," was not the man whose ardent 
 sympathy could fail to be aroused for men struggling to be 
 free, from whatever land or race they might have sprung. 
 It may be that in this matter Scotsmen have been gifted 
 with a larger view because of the influence of Burns. It is 
 certain that their perfervid patriotism, so far from ex- 
 pending itself on its immediate object, has prompted them 
 to spring to the defense of the larger issue — the all- 
 embracing cause. Their blood has already reddened the 
 soil of the old battlefield in Flanders where their fathers 
 fought, and the end is not yet in sight. But there can be 
 only one end to a struggle in which such a cause brings to 
 
its defense men animated by such a spirit. One would be 
 tempted to doubt the continued existence of the balance of 
 the universal scheme of creation, if a flagrant defiance of 
 the first principles of right and justice should be crowned 
 with success; if barbarity should oust humanity; if truth, 
 compassion and brotherhood can safely be rejected as 
 attributes of men. Burns lived in a time when Satanic 
 influences had also their hour of triumph, and he encoun- 
 tered in his life glaring instances enough of man's in- 
 humanity to man. But his faith did not waver either in 
 the future of his country's freedom or in the ultimate 
 supremacy of the noblest aspirations of the race: 
 
 "Then let us pray that come it may, 
 
 As come it will for a' that; 
 That sense and worth o'er a' the earth 
 
 May bear the gree, and a' that. 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 It's coming yet, for a' that, 
 That man to man the warld o'er 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
 That conviction has come to be part of the every-day 
 thought of the plain, ordinary Scotsman; it belongs to the 
 very fibre and distinctive cast of his mind. But that, too, 
 like the intensity of the love of country which he shares 
 with Burns and with generations of ancestry of whom 
 Burns was the natural heir, needed the endowment of a 
 vivid imagination to make it a spring of action. I think 
 you will agree with me that it is largely because of the 
 quickness with which they respond to the imaginative im- 
 pulse that so many Scotsmen are in the forefront of the 
 struggle which convulses the world to-day — that they have 
 been the readiest among Britons to discern the real issues 
 of that gigantic conflict, and the most willing to lay down 
 their lives that freedom may not perish from the earth and 
 mere brute force reign supreme among men. It was to this 
 imagination that Burns made his appeal, and he did it so 
 successfully that Emerson could truthfully say : "The con- 
 fession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the 
 French Rights of Man and the Marseillaise, are not more 
 weighty documents in the history of freedom than the 
 songs of Burns." 
 
 It will be the part of history to place a true valuation 
 
on what the British Empire owes to the spirit that pos- 
 sessed Burns — a spirit that will live in the breasts of men 
 of Scottish blood while his memory endures. I have 
 steadily contended that the sentiment which holds the 
 Empire together has nothing to do with questions of tariff 
 or trade. When Canada, Australia and New Zealand send 
 many more men to fight for the Empire than it was 
 thought possible before this war for the United Kingdom 
 itself to equip for service abroad, it is in obedience to 
 something higher than a merely commercial prompting. 
 For an Empire that comprises one-fifth of the human 
 family and occupies about the same proportion of the 
 habitable surface of the globe, which, if it is to be united 
 at all, must be bound together by a sentiment which the 
 Malay of the Federated States shares with the Canadian, 
 the Jamaica negro with the New Zealander, the Hottentot 
 in his kraal with the denizen of Mayfair, the enthusiasm 
 of the bagman will not take the place of a soul. If citizen- 
 ship of Rome were valued as a proud distinction even by 
 the Apostle of the Gentiles, think you that citizenship of a 
 greater, juster and more beneficent Empire shall not be 
 cherished for its own sake by all her sons? Colonial 
 patriotism need not die to make way for this feeling, any 
 more than Scottish patriotism has died. Love for the land 
 of our birth, be it ever so intense, pride in the deeds of her 
 sons, be it ever so conscious, merely tend to exalt the love 
 and pride that are stirred by the greater entity of which 
 the land is merely a part. Nay, more— unless you have 
 the one I cannot think it possible you will be richly en- 
 dowed with the other. If the blood does not leap in a' 
 your veins as you read Scott's noble apostrophe beginning, 
 "Lives there the man with soul so dead?" I cannot believe 
 that your breast will greatly swell as you think how free- 
 dom's banner streams like a thunder cloud against the 
 wind in Armageddon. Nor can I imagine that the reflec- 
 tion will ever occur to you that the vital principles of 
 human freedom are as clearly at stake in the battlefields 
 of Europe to-day as they were at Marathon and Salamis, 
 and that the defeat of the Allies would mean the eclipse 
 of all civilization worthy of the name as surely as the 
 defeat of the Greeks would have meant twenty-four hun- 
 dred years ago. 
 
 8 
 
And the people of this our adopted land, composite of 
 all races but always closer akin to our own, whose pulses 
 quicken at the strains of "Scots wha hae," and all the 
 breadth of whose human sympathy responds to the senti- 
 ment of "A man's a man for a' that," think you that they 
 can be indifferent spectators of the shifting fortunes of 
 the battle-shock between the highest and the lowest of 
 human ideals? This Republic has flourished and grown 
 great because it has given to men of all nations, kindreds 
 and tongues, the priceless boon of opportunity, and its 
 crowning glory is that step by step with its growth in 
 wealth and power there has gone on, through its agency 
 and influence, the betterment and the elevation of human- 
 ity. Even the hyphenated citizen who abuses the hospi- 
 tality of the United States to conspire against its peace, 
 conducts his plotting under the aegis of that inherited 
 British freedom which Caledonia nursed and of which 
 Burns sang — of that equal justice which the fathers of this 
 Republic were taught to revere because it rested on the 
 strongest bulwark ever fashioned against tyranny, the 
 common law of England. We may palter and falter, and 
 temporize as we will, but the struggle is ours also, and with 
 its issue is bound up our very existence as a free people. 
 It was with a clear vision that Robert Burns hailed in 
 George Washington the architect of an edifice of human 
 freedom worthy of the admiration of Scotsmen. It will 
 be a dull and purblind generation that finds in the counsel 
 of Washington reason for standing idly by while the very 
 existence of the principles that triumphed with Washing- 
 ton is at stake. 
 
 I do not seek to intrude here within the domain of 
 statesmanship, and I have no indictment to bring against 
 the men who have had to deal with a situation of excep- 
 tional delicacy and difficulty. My purpose is to prove that 
 the cult of freedom, of which our national poet was a 
 veritable high priest, has moulded the character of our 
 Scottish race and helped to fan to a white heat the devotion 
 to liberty of men and nations to-day. Partakers of the 
 exaltation of mind and spirit which this world-struggle has 
 generated, our American people are not yet. But it is not 
 too much to say that their thoughts are slowly broadening 
 
 9 
 
as they gaze, and I feel that they, too, will have a higher 
 and clearer outlook as they realize that there has passed 
 over our people in the old home, as with a breath of the 
 Divine spirit, a marvelous transformation of soul. I am 
 not making a too partial claim when I say that this trans- 
 formation is in the line of spiritual succession from the 
 national consciousness of which Burns was the greatest 
 exemplar. In the new note that has been sounded in the 
 English poetry of to-day, there is an echo of both the feel- 
 ing and method of our national bard, and he who gave 
 promise of being the greatest English poet of our time had 
 much in common with Robert Burns. Untimely cut off at 
 twenty-seven, a martyr to the cause of which he, easily 
 and naturally, became the laureate, Rupert Brooke is one 
 fitted to command the homage of every lover of Burns, 
 than whom of all the poets that have gone before none 
 would have so sincerely appreciated and so warmly ex- 
 tolled these lines : 
 
 "Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! 
 
 There's none of those so lonely and poor or old, 
 But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold, 
 These laid the world away; poured out the red 
 Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be 
 Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
 That men call age ; and those who would have been, 
 Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 
 
 "Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us, for our dearth, 
 Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. 
 
 Honor has come back, as a king, to earth 
 And paid his subjects with a royal wage; 
 
 And Nobleness walks in our ways again; 
 And we have come into our heritage." 
 
 10 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 014 388 013 8 & 
 
014 388 013 8 
 
 Hotlin 
 
 pH i 
 
 Mill Run 1 
 
Hollinger 
 
 pH 8.5 
 
 Mul Run F03-2193