“Even before Canada received its present political institutions there were established several universities,” Meighen said. “Those institutions were modeled pretty much after yours. My own alma mater, Toronto University, owes its inception to the energy and devotion to learning of a Scotsman. Compared with this ancient foundation its tradition is short, but when one remembers that the British flag has flown over Canada for only a hundred and sixty years, a university with a charter a century old is no longer juvenile. It has grown to extraordinary dimensions, and is now, I believe, if measured by the number of students within its pale, one of the largest in the Empire.”

Meighen then continued.

“The preoccupations of a new country are, as you know, intensely practical; and institutions of learning like all other institutions, moulded as they are by national temper, have in such a country greater tendency to concentrate on the practical than they would have in older lands,” he said. “I hope that tendency will not drive too far. I hope that the example of Edinburgh will again be contagious, that the example of other grand old universities in these islands will keep us right. I do trust that all this glamour of the practical will never be allowed to obscure the lofty but fundamental purpose of every seat of learning: the enlargement of the mind, the cultivation of the understanding, the purifying of taste.”

“To these ends every branch of university studies should be subordinate. Only in that way can they cause the light to shine; only in that way can they diffuse those better things which interest and invigorate, which inspire and sustain, which comfort in adversity and temper in triumph; only in that way can they contribute to the production of those finer fruits of literature and art and science by which people of our own and future ages are wont to judge the human standard of a nation, and which survive without concern of time long after the nation itself may have passed away.”