Dedication Speech by Ramsay MacDonald

“Mr Carrick, Ladies and Gentlemen – When I received an invitation just before I left home to come and perform this ceremony, well, my friends, it was nothing but human nature to embrace an opportunity of having such an honour done to me.   I know something about Western Canada; I know something about Vancouver, and I know in consequence what a large number of those who have pioneered in Western Canada, came from our auld Mither Scotland.   I know how those men used to thumb their Burns, long after they had committed it almost completely to memory, because somehow or other, explain it as we may, in Burns there was that magic that made every Scotsman alive; that made him thrill with consciousness of his nationality, and made him strong and powerful to do his duty in the world. 

 Ah, my friends, in unveiling this statue we perform a proper act of worship; we fulfil an obligation which we owe to our Scottish birth.   There was a lad was born in Kyle and the hansel that he got was a blast of Januar’ wind.   Through his life that wind blew, the wind that cut him, that wind chilled him, and at last that life ended in that obscure town of Dumfries.  But, my friends, whilst the wind of adversity blew, and whilst experience after experience tended to crush the heart out of the man, somehow or other – who can tell how? – somehow or other he heard the music that has been humming for ages in the heart of our people; he caught up the folk-song, the folk-story, and he embodied Scotland as though it were a being to worship and to love, and he hummed that music and he gave out that music.   He was like a harp that responded to the winds.   The winds that played upon Burns’ soul were the emotions and experiences of the lives of the common people of Scotland.   He was never stilted.   He never went outside our range and our ken and our vision and our personality.  But what was common to our clay he glorified, he transfigured into song, into glorious thought, into inspiring emotions, and Burns, when he passed into the new life, from that mean and common street in Dumfries, passed also through the gateway where mortals go to be turned immortal, and at the moment of his death he experienced a new and immortal resurrection.

 This is not the time, and it is not the place, in large open-air meeting, to appreciate Burns and to explain his mysteries, but what we have got to remember is this: That the music of his song lasted, that it spread, that the world heard it and it was not only Burns, the man, who attained – it was Scotland his mither, Scotland, our nation, you and I, who attained with him.   Every Scotsman shares in the honour of Burns.   Burns cast a glamour and an interest round us all.   He gave Scotland a lyrical muse to attend upon her and to be in waiting with her.   You and I are sometimes reticent, my fellow Scotsmen and Scotswomen; we do not wear our hearts upon our sleeves, and we do not always help others to understand us.

 But Burns has made it clear to the whole world that Scotland’s heart is the heart of the seer; that Scotland’s romance is the romance of the lover; that Scotland’s tenderness is the tenderness of him and her who shares life in common, life with the humblest creature with four legs on the face of the earth, life that belongs to the simplest and commonest flower; somehow, by the mystery of God, the essence of life shared in by them and by ourselves, a discovery made by Burns in a supreme discovery of knowledge.

 Burns also told the world that in Scotland there is a sturdiness of heart that belongs to the man of independent mind, the man who can lift up his head in the eyes of the world, poor and down-trodden, but remaining, “A Man for a’ that.”   In a peculiar way, Burns has become his own memorial.  You and I, my friends, when we go, will be enshrouded in the mists of oblivion.   When we leave, the mosses will grow and the name will be obliterated, but Burns, Burns the man, Burns, the magic name, will live and grow in his glory more and more unto the perfect day.   He stands with the immortals.   You today, in this far-away land, still seeing in your dreams the Hebrides; you of whom it can be said, when the flower is in bud and the life is in the tree, the lark will sing me hame to my ain country; you out of the offerings of your heart, and out of the appropriateness of things have erected in this public park of Vancouver this statue that you have done me the great honour of asking me to unveil.   Every time you see it, every time you pass it, your heads will be lifted up; every time you behold it, that bond which unites us all together wherever we may be – that bond which makes us Scotsmen and Scotswomen possessors of a great inheritance, not of material things, but of qualities, an inheritance which we have to guard because we cannot allow it to deteriorate, an inheritance which will last only insofar as we follow great examples, the democratic thinkers, the beautiful singers, the men and women who have kept fresh and green and alive the lyrical nature of our being, at the head of whom, the king of whom the first of them all, is Robert Burns; only insofar as you honour them and keep their memories green will you be worthy children and safe guardians of the inheritance that they have handed over to your keeping.

  So, my friends, I have the greatest pleasure and the greatest honour in unveiling this statue, so that it may become the public possession of the citizens of Vancouver.”