Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/258

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1890.—Lord Reay.
243

you of those who have felt the power of this supreme obligation. Ask them and they will tell you with one voice that in this the highest use of the education which they have gained as students of the University, they have reaped its richest fruit and its best reward. The performance of tasks such as these will be the best fulfilment of the charge which has been delivered to you as you stood here to receive your degrees, "that ever in your life and conversation you show yourselves worthy of the same." It is a divine law which has attached these high obligations to the privileges which it is the function of this University to bestow. Go forth, then, upon your life's career, resolved to obey it and thus to grow

Not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour,
In reverence and in charity.

The Chancellor then addressed the Senate as follows:—

Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen,—I wish to plead not guilty to the indictment which the Vice-Chancellor has at the beginning of his suggestive and admirable address preferred against me. The Vice-Chancellor has accused me of shirking my duty on this occasion in not addressing you. Now, what really did happen was this, that I discounted my speech, and delivered it elsewhere, so that this year you have had an address from the Chancellor and one from the Vice-Chancellor. And you need not fear that you are going to have a second address from the Chancellor. I delivered an account of my educational stewardship at Poona, which I might have delivered here, but the reason why I did not deliver it here was that I thought I could show my respect for this great institution in a greater measure by listening to the record of events from the lips of one who himself had had an active share in proposing and carrying the reforms which have been during the last year adopted by the Senate. My expectations have been fully realised. The Vice-Chancellor has not, however, alluded to one fact in your past history, to which it will be my duty to allude now—I mean the Bill which the distinguished late Vice-Chancellor drafted in that capacity for the University. Unfortunately he forgot the ceremony of adoption when the natural father deserted the child—and the result was that this Bill arrived in the Senate without a father or even a godfather. In the changed relation between father and child the former had as a member of Government to look upon it in a different light. As Vice-Chancellor, with the authority which attaches to everything that falls from him in legal and educational matters, he would have undoubtedly justified the conditions under which it was introduced in the Senate. But Government—and I lay great stress on this fact—fully