As I face this audience I am overcome by that compounded feeling of fascinated envy and sheer fury which overtakes, in different proportions, my countrymen when confronted by the quintessence of English cultural achievement, Oxford; so profoundly attractive and so irreconcilably alien. As a child I thought that Englishmen were just the same, Scotsmen with a different accent; but now I know, through experience, that they are different; that environment and tradition have moulded their characters according to a different pattern, a difference which expresses itself in a thousand subtle contrasts of emotional reaction and temperament—perhaps most strikingly emphasised in the contrast (so difficult to define) between English humour and Scottish wit.

Such contrasts, deeper experience shows, do not utterly divide. Quite apart from their common history, not always a uniting factor, both peoples recognise that they share a common culture pattern and, more important, that they are the same kind of beings. No doubt a platitude, but one pregnant with significance.

Generalise the analogy! Within infinitely greater contrasts, beneath the most diverse cultures, breaking through cleavages due to colour, custom and opinion, which stretch back indefinitely beyond recorded history, man remains irreducibly man. Biologist and theologian are at least agreed in that.

Irreconcilably opposed in everything save their humanity! If you doubt it look at the record of history: issues, so easy to settle, so simple at root, twisted and travestied beyond recognition and buried under the bodies of whole generations till the problems they beget are so beset by tension, so clouded by emotion, that they can only be solved by annihilation.