Address by Frank Henderson MP - Dundee

Provost Brownlee, ladies and gentlemen – before proceeding to the performance of the highly honourable part which has most unexpectedly been assigned to me today – a day which will be memorable in the history of Dundee – I beg to ask your indulgence whilst I make a very few observations, which I hope you will consider not inappropriate on this great occasion.  The first fact that strikes me in witnessing this vast assemblage and the enthusiasm which pervades it is the strong and ever-tightening grasp which Burns has taken of the heart and affections of the Scottish people.  The memory of no other Scotsman – I may truly say, the memory of no other man – could have evoked a sentiment of love and reverence so deep and so universal as is manifest here today.    We are here to unveil to you and to generations of Dundonians yet unborn, a visible, a tangible expression of the unseen but real power of that sentiment in all our hearts today – to show to our children and our children’s children, to all how may now or hereafter claim Scotland as their “auld respected mither,” that we in Dundee are not behind in doing homage to one of her most illustrious and most loving, although one of her poorest sons.   I believe I am not expected to enter into any elaborate discussion of Burns’ merits as a poet, or any careful examination of his life and character.  If I had been I would certainly have shrunk from the undertaking a task so far beyond my powers.   But we are not here to criticise, to weigh in the balance all he wrote and did, and to pass judgement upon him with judicial impartiality.  The time for that, so far as this movement is concerned, is past.   We are here to honour his memory, and to remember only that which was noble in his character and immortal in his song.    The critics have done their worst upon him. But they have come at last to see that the people push their petty fault finding, their moral essays, their miserable detractions impatiently aside – that they refuse to allow the specks and blemishes too surely and too easily to be found to affect their estimates of his character or dim the lustre of his genius.    For, after all that can be said and proved against him has been said, the fact remains and will ever remain as the central fact of his life, that Burns loved Scotland and its people with all the passion and energy of his own tempestuous nature.   Scotsmen everywhere have joyfully surrendered themselves to the magic of that passionate love, and give him a throne in their hearts from which he can never be displaced.  Casting aside, therefore, all carping criticism and remembering that he was also mortal and fallible like ourselves, let us regard him in the spirit of those beautiful lines of his, written as if in anticipation of the trial through which his memory would pass:-

“Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler your sister woman:

Thou they may gang a kennin’ wrang,

To step aside is human.

Then at the balance let’s a’ be mute

We never can adjust it;

What’s done we partly may compute

But know not what’s resisted.”

and today, at least, hold inviolate the sanctity of that spell –

“The spell by nature bound

Around the voiceless dead;

The spell that softens censure’s sound

And guards the dreamless bed.”

We seek to honour the memory of Burns today on various grounds.   As a poet he stands, if not, in the very highest rank, very near the very highest.   But as the national poet of Scotland he stands without peer.   It is as our national poet that we raise this statue to his memory.  It is our humble tribute to his marvellous genius, his lofty patriotism, his unconquerable independence, his irrepressible love of liberty, his intense abhorrence of tyranny and oppression in all their forms, his boundless sympathy, not only with that which is distinctive, but with that also which is highest purest and noblest, in the Scottish character.     No one has read the Scottish character with a truer, keener or more loving eye.  No one has interpreted with such a wonderful freshness, fidelity and power.   It is because he did so that Burns stands in a relation to Scotland and Scotsmen in which the poet of no other country stand to their countrymen and the land of their birth.   We find in Burns, the peasant born, one of the people, one who understood every phase and aspect of humble Scottish life; who sang and who sings still, our loves, our joys, our griefs with a sweetness, a tenderness and a power which find their way direct and at once to the heart of all true Scottish men and women.   It is because he has done so that Burns has endeared himself to every Scottish heart.  It is because he wrote, not from hearsay, but from actual sight and experience, that, although dead, he is still a living presence; and whenever Scotsmen meet and part they never fail to see the stalwart ploughman with the flashing eyes, and hail him as friend and brother.  But it is not his intense sympathy with Scottish men and women which constitutes his sole title to our admiration.   In his great heart there was a place for Nature in all its forms.   For the mouse – the “wee sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,” that started panic-stricken from his plough; for the wounded hare, lamed by murderous aim, that limped past him on the dewy lawn; for the mountain daisy – “Wee modest crimson-tipped flower,” that met him in an evil hour; for

“Auld Scotland’s plains and fells

Her moors, red-brown wi’ heather bells

Her banks and braes, her dens and dells;”

For “ilka bird” that “wanton’d ‘mid the flowering thorn;” for every bush and tree and “wimpling stream” he had a heart of love.   All spoke to him in tones which only the poet of Nature hears aright, and to which he alone in fittest melody can respond.   But Burns not only threw a mantle of poetry over much of the scenery of Scotland; he purified the stream of Scottish song, and preserved the simple soul-stirring music of his country, by wedding to it those words which still soothe or sadden or delight all true Scotsmen from cradle to grave.  Still if we seek the true secret of his fame, and the unbounded enthusiasm of the people for his memory, we will find it, I think, in what he did specially for them in setting them the example and inciting them to the practice of manly independence which was conspicuously characteristic of himself.   He shed a glory round the struggles of honest poverty.   He lifted labour from the ditch and set it upon a throne.

“The honest man, though e’er sae poor,

Is king o’men for a’ that.”

He showed that nobility of soul was confined to no rank in life; but was to be found in the cottage as well as in the palace; that peers were the creation of earthly kings but that the honest man was the noblest work of God himself.  Further, he stamped the truth of these burning words on the hearts of men by finding his example of what is acceptable worship to God in heaven, not in the gorgeous ritual, a powerful priesthood or in swelling organ tones pealing through some vast cathedral, but in the simple “Let us worship God” uttered by the patriarchal ploughman in a clay-built cottar house.  Under the inspiration of these two ideas with which Burns had furnished him – the essential dignity of his labour and the possible nobility of his life – the Scottish working man became transformed.  The “coward slave” struck off his chains; he ceased to beg his brother man for leave to toil: he stood erect in all the dignity of his manhood; and in an age which worshipped wealth and rank alone he raised his head and vindicated his claim to be recognised as a man and a brother; he dared “be poor for a’ that.”    I could go on far beyond the limits of your patience showing to you how much Burns deserves of his country and mankind; but I will not.  I have not spoken of the far-reaching scope of his sympathy and love, which led him to see, as in some millennial vision, the time, the end of strife and bloodshed and to pray that

“….come it may,

As come it will for a’ that,

That man to man the warld o’er

Shall brithers be far a’ that”

or to his boundless charity, which extended to and included the author of evil himself –

“But fare you weel auld Nickie-ben!

Oh wad ye tak’ a thought o’ men

I’m wae tae think upo’ yon den

Ev’n for your sake!”

Neither have I done justice to that passionate love of his country and its patriot heroes which found expression in the grandest war-ode ever penned or sung.   “Scots wha hae,” now the war-song of a brave and proud and warlike race, that has fired the blood and nerved the arms of Scotland’s sons on many a glorious field.   But its martial strains can never inspire them to glorious victory except in the battle of right against might, of liberty against “oppressions, woes and chains,” unless Scotsmen prove recreant to the faith and hope of their noble bard.   I am proud to have the distinguished honour of unveiling the statue of the one whose memory we all love and cherish, feeling that, despite al human frailties and imperfections, he was a priceless and imperishable gift to Scotland and to us.  I commit it in your name to the safe keeping of the authorities of our town, convinced as I am that, however zealously they may fulfil the trusted reposed in them, it is safer far in the protection it will find in the veneration and love which the name of Burns can never fail to excite in the hearts of all true-hearted citizens of Dundee.