Address by Munro Ferguson  MP

I am invited as your representative to present this statue to Leith in memory of the greatest of Scotsmen, the guardian of liberty, our best loved hero.   We meet on this common platform, for as is above all party, sect, or class, so are we , his admirers, when assembled here together.   It is a mark of the healthy spirit, of the unity of our race, when the most ardent radical truly reveres the name of Scott and the most unbending Tory enthusiastically acclaims that of Burns.

His life and its struggles, his verse and his satire live in the mind, stir the blood, inspire the action of all sorts and conditions of men.   It could be wished, and certainly by no one more than myself, that this ceremony was performed by one fitted to speak upon Burns.   That has been done before and in more than of the most noble orations.   It has been done so often and so well that it should not be too rashly attempted again.   That is, perhaps, why you have fallen back upon purely local resources, upon one of the humbler, if one of the most faithful, of the students of our National Poet.   We have to express our gratitude to the Leith Club. Leith has fewer statues than Edinburgh but now with the aid of Mr. Stevenson she has one that can hold its own by the side of the best of those with which the capital has adorned itself.   Edinburgh has the portrait by Nasmyth, but that, in the view of great authority, was “Burns diminished: seen in perspective” – a criticism which will not be made on our statue.   The Club has brought before our citizens, to stand here forever, the best representation it could obtain of the man whom of all others we most wish we could have seen.   For the more our interest is awakened in some great attractive or mysterious personality the more we long to know the form in which it dwelt.  No memoir, no history can quite do that for us.   In the page of Froude one may almost see Queen Mary on her last morning at Fotheringay, but what would we not give to have her picture as she landed here from France.  Though we almost see Burns in his writings and follow his varying moods by the trace of his pen, still even his picture is incomplete, for we know from the men and women most competent to judge, that in appearance, in controversy or in conversation he was no less remarkable than as a poet.   The erection of a statue is immaterial to the reputation of Burns.   No portrait or statue can make a reputation. Between St Giles and the Parliament House Charles II fills the eye, high upon his charger, but you must closely watch the cobblestones ere you discover one of the most notable of all memorials, the little bronze plate with its ‘J. K.’ – all that stands and all that ever needed to that other great tribune of the Scottish people – John Knox.   It does not follow, however, that this memorial will not affect us.    We are here in a money-making, struggling, striving city not without its stirring traditions- what nook of Scotia’s soil is without them? – but not exactly a home which it would occur to anyone to call “mystic romantic town.”  Like some other things and as in the Inventory of Mossgiel, a good deal has been taken as it is found. With our lives it is less so they are more what we and our friends like to make them, and the time of accomplishment is very short.  Burns is a sure friend and comforter in the struggle of life to all who know him.    Will this figure standing here not inspire any man with even one new thought as he passes by, whether to hand work or to head work?   Will it not give him something to cheer the common task or to banish the sordid care: something to stir to some practical reflection – “be independent” and therefore “gather gear” though “Who fears for honest poverty?” something kindly:

“Then gently scan your brother Man

Still gentler sister Woman”               

Something that bites as when he urged enlightenment:

“There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard

But they wham the truth wad indite”

Something that warms:

“Man’s inhumanity to Man makes countless thousands mourn.”

And so on through war ode or love sonnet letter or address until each chord that is us may be touched by that master hand.  That I believe to be the true need for a memorial here rather than in the West.

The East may be far set from the West in some ways but such differences may serve to remind us that there is no parochialism in his spirit, no selfishness in his patriotism.   It has been said of one kind of patriotism that it shrinks like leather in the cold, hating all that is foreign, making a man no more a citizen of the world but only a narrow particularist.   That again, to another, patriotism means that his heart is warmed, that this warmth extends and diffuses itself until his love embraces, not only  his immediate belongings, but the whole country, the whole civilised world.    As then the heart of Burns went out to all mankind in sympathy for all that is dark in love for all that is bright.   As he dared to strike as none other has struck against oppression, superstition and wrong - he has given us the motto, “I dare” – so the heart of the strongest, the kindliest, the most honest of her sons.   What is there that we would wish for more than to have in our veins the blood of some friend to Burns – one who had stood by him when his back was to the wa’.   So far as addresses upon Burns can carve out his niche in the Temple of Fame that work begun by his contemporaries and carried on by Carlyle, was finished at the Centenary celebrations.   There are already memoirs, essays and speeches in the Burns literature which are an adequate conclusion to the whole matter – almost as remarkable, some of them in their own way, as is the life itself.   Yet people still speak or are expected to speak inside or outside of Burns clubs; still fresh discoveries are made; and still are his memorials set-up as the most cherished of our Lares.   The Dumfries Centenary showed the depth and breadth of his great current affection.  The concourse of people there, the thousands of delegates, the interminable stream of deputations bearing their tributes, with which even South Africa, Australia and New Zealand combined to heap on the grave – among them none were found to withhold regret and admiration a hundred years after one of the saddest of all deaths.  There was the same wide difference between the passing of Burns and its commemoration, as between the scene of the great historical entry into Jerusalem two thousand years ago and that which is being prepared for another entry there next month.   And all this was no unreasonable enthusiasm.   Scotsmen seldom act without consideration and have not been commonly taunted with leaving the head too much or too long under the influence of the heart.   These Centenary celebrations, like the addresses, were the outcome of mature judgment upon Burns which had not been finally delivered until then.   After all it took the English twice as long to discover what they had produced in Shakespeare.   We, with all our advantages in the knowledge of local colouring and of glossary were not always unhampered in forming our judgment.   For example, in the preface to a model edition, published well on in this century, the respectable editor informs us that dullness being preferable to unorthodoxy, he had virtually bowdlerised and left out some of the chief pieces.   Many other good people have their “doots” about Burns, which may still be heard in selected circles outside Scotland; but in another hundred years the non-Scottish world, if such a thing should then exist – will see him as he is.   Even now one may still hear of Burns as a somewhat uncouth prodigy, the writer of delicately beautiful sonnets, of one orthodox representation of life as it ought to be in a labourer’s model cottage and of other pieces not so delicate upon Scottish peculiarities of the olden time – these written in a tongue which more often than not, happily, veils them from the unctuous rectitude of the civilised world.   Amongst the English poets, Tennyson judged him favourably, but solely by his sonnets, Wordsworth found nothing favourable in him.   Now we in Scotland form our own estimate of Burns mainly upon his infinite power to awaken and give effect to human sympathy, on the one hand, or on the other, to kindle scorn against all oppression, all cant, all that is mean, upon his fearless crusade against the inequality of human condition, upon his love of independence, his spirit of liberty.  If there have been greater singers than he, not one has appealed so directly to so many with less thought of his hire or with more regard for the glory of his country – not one has consecrated such powers to the service of the people.

His writing has the magic of a certain tree whose fruit he said: “It raises man abune the brute and mak’s him ken himsel.”   No statesman or writer has wielded a more beneficial influence than Burns in spurring the world to free itself from false dogma, pretension or prejudice.   Yet in his call for freedom, in his demand for essential equality, he was neither a literary dreamer nor a mouthing revolutionary.   To him freedom meant independence.  The equality he worshipped was that of intellect and character.   He idealised rude toil and glorified honest poverty, he preached the honest man as the noblest work of God; and it was standing on that impregnable rock that he struck down every sham.   He gave his message to a world towards which he had no cause to feel particularly grateful, yet his was not the impulse of pique or envy, nor his the rage of hatred or malice.   His Voltairean powers of ridicule were debased in no petty service.   Had he cared “Ower hot for thought, ower fast for rule,” to be a demagogue, he might have shown what a demagogue could be.   But the tree of liberty which he set up struck deep its roots and flung wide its branches as a lasting protection to the law-abiding people whom he loved so well.   And he struck his highest note to bequeath the great article of his creed when he was sick unto death; suffering from want, stung by neglect, “uncertain whether his message had been delivered, haunted by despair.”   We judge of the relative value of his works by one very simple test that of learning him by heart in youth, and by realising later on that the lines that come home to us most readily.   My impression is that the songs are most commonly associated with the general mass of our minstrelsy as are the Psalms of David with much of  the Bible.   It would be hard for us to name off-hand those who wrote the familiar words in the ordinary soiree programme with “their wild happiness of thought and expression,” but we all know who wrote ‘Holy Willie’ and his laugh at the sisters twain of the ‘Holy Fair,’ who it was that made a poor drunken gang of cadgers rank with the immortals and who wrote as only one man could write, to king and cotter, the Unco Guid Beelsebub, the Twa Dogs; or the Scottish Representatives, Dr Hornbrook or the Young Friend, John Barleycorn or The Daisy, Hallowe’en or Toothache, Mouse or Whistle.   It is by such pictures of life in all its infinite richness and variety tinted as by Turner, that we know our poet. As well judge Scott by ‘Rokeby’ and ‘The Life of Napoleon,’ as judge Burns by without these.  He was not a saint – but he never set up as one.  He rather gave wholesome justice to saints of various kinds.   As he said, “The devil, the world and the fleshare three formidable foes.  The first I generally fly from, the second, alas, generally tries to fly from me but the third is my plague.”    Yet he did some things that he ought not to have done,and left undone some others that he might have done, we know of it all chiefly from himself, for he scorned to lie, and we know are not going to be too hard on a man who toiled for men.  And now I dedicate this statue to his memory – that memory which we could spare least from Scottish annals, for to him we chiefly owe that image of Scotland which we cherish in our hearts.   He is the type of our race, the spirit incarnate of our national character in all its strength and in all its weakness, and the man who has added meaning and richness and endearment to the very name of Scotland.