life as anyone could wish to live, save for the misery of seeing so much cruel wrong and needless suffering around me. Yet I am no more entitled to that happiness than any of my fellows.
'One of your university men was lamenting to me this morning that the working class in Scotland were more and more taking to cheap periodical literature and shoddy professional music-hall jingles, to the neglect of your beautiful vernacular Scottish songs and the works of Walter Scott and other good writers. And it is, don't you think, a lamentable thing that the literary taste of the people should, despite the fact of the spread of what is called Education, or perhaps largely in consequence of it, be turning away from one of the few wholesome and beautiful things of the past now left us, to the silly and trashy and mostly vile stuff written and published nowadays merely as a means of money-grabbing.
'In England they have a beautiful custom in the churches of celebrating the gathering of the harvest by having a special thanksgiving service, on which occasion the churches are decorated with flowers, and the altar laden with all manner of fruits, grains, and vegetables. I suppose you have a similar custom in Scotland. The custom indeed seems to be observed in all parts of the world, by peoples of all races and all creeds.
'A friend and comrade of mine, a master engineer, who has carried out great engineering schemes in South America, tells me that in dealing with the natives there, it is much more important to treat or seem to treat them kindly—humanly, that is to say—than even to treat them justly. If, for example, when asked to do something—help, say, in finding cattle, food, or material—they are asked rather as friends than as inferiors, they will respond far more willingly, even if the task is an unduly hard one. So also, if when paying them for any work or purchases, miserable though the payment may be, if what is given them is given in a cheerful way, as though acknowledging a favour rather
