quite alive to the fact that they cannot afford to cast their votes merely according to their individual opinions and personal prejudices—­that they are trustees for the nation, and that while it is their duty to prevent the nation being hustled into revolution, as but for them it would have been hustled into Home Rule in 1893, they have no right to resist changes upon which the nation has clearly and after full deliberation set its mind.  And when the Prime Minister says that it is intolerable arrogance on the part of the House of Lords to pretend to know better what the nation wishes than the House of Commons, I can only reply that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  In 1893 the House of Commons said that the nation wished Home Rule.  The House of Lords had the intolerable arrogance to take a different view.  Well, within less than two years the question was submitted to the nation; and who proved to be right?

I regret to have had to dwell at such length upon this particular topic.  But it seems to me that we have no choice in the matter.  If the Government succeed in their attempt to divert the attention of the nation from matters of the greatest interest at home and abroad in order to involve us all in a constitutional struggle on a false issue, we must be prepared to meet them.  But I do not wish to waste the rare opportunity afforded to me to-night of addressing this great and representative Scottish audience by talking exclusively about this regrettable manoeuvre.  There is something I am anxious to say to you about the future of the Unionist party.  I do not claim to lay down a policy for that or for any party.  I am not, by temperament or antecedents, a good party man.  But I want to be allowed, as a private citizen, to point out what are the great services which I think the Unionist party can render to the nation at the present very critical juncture in its history.  The Unionist party has a splendid record in the past.  For twenty years it has saved the United Kingdom from disruption.  It has preserved South Africa for the Empire; and, greatly as I feel and know, that the results of the efforts and sacrifices of the nation have been marred and impaired by the disastrous policy of the last two years, South Africa is still one country under the British flag.  And all the time, in spite of foreign war and domestic sedition, the Unionist party has pursued a steady policy of practical social reform, and the administrative and legislative record of the last twenty years will compare favourably with that of any period of our history.

But no party can afford to rely upon its past achievements.  How is the Unionist party going to confront the great problems of the present day?  The greatest of these problems, as I shall never cease to preach to my countrymen, is the maintenance of the great heritage which we owe to the courage, the enterprise, and the self-sacrifice of our forefathers, who built up one of the greatest Empires in history by, on the whole,