SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTEn,', THE RT. HON. R. G.
MENZIES AT KNOX COLLEGE, SYDNEY ON THURSDAY?
DECEMBER? l9 O
I think I ought to begin by making two apologies, one
is for the absence of my wife, who would have reoatly enjoyed
being here, but who, in a sudden onrush of what I can only
describe as eccentricity decided to have her four Melbourne
grandchildren to stay with her at the Lodge, ranging from 9 to
3J, and all of them with a considerable element of old Adam and
old Eve. ( Laughter) Therefore she wished me to make her
apologies to you.
In the second place, whether it is because I have been
away from her, I am not in the best of form tonight you may say
that I seldom am. ( Laughter) The last couple of nights I have
not been able to sleep. I don't know what it is. The only
explanation that will occur to some of you is that conscience has
at last caught up with me. ( Laughter) Well whether that is so,
or not, I don't know; Itll leave it to you.
I have a variety of reasons for being glad to be here
and one of them, outstandingly, is that the Chairman tonight is
a very old friend of mine4
I referred just now to my wife. At a time when the
Rev., P. J. Murdoch was preaching in Trinity Church Camberwell in
the State of Victoria he had two fine looking lads in the Church
one was Ullan Murdoch, and one was myself ( Laughter) and an
uncommonly good looking girl who was a boarder at the Church
School nearby. WIell in that contest I won ( Laughter) because she
married me. Not, Allan, that I think you did too badl~ y yourself.
( Laughter) Now there is one thing that I like very much about the
programmeo tonight. I've always maintained that we Scots
Presbyterians have a very practical outlook. Toni,'' ht it has
been brilliantly arranged. I've been to a few Speech Nights and
they always tell you to hand out the prizes first and speak
afterwards. tVell, it's very hard on the boys they've collected
their loot ( Laughter), their interest in the proceedings is
completely terminated, and therefore they say, " Who's this old
fellow ( Laughter) spouting away?"
But tonight I have them., in the hollow of rmy hand. If
they count me out inside the next ten minutes then all I can
say is, " Counting, out, no prizes". And judging by the look of
the table there must be a m~ ost brilliant collection of school
boys in this place that I've ever heard of. ( Laughter)
You may think that gping, to a Speech Nig ht from the
point of view of a political old hand like myself is a rather
dull business. Do you know it is very stimulating? The other
day I handed out to a boy, who struck mie as being very
intelligent to look at, the Senior prize in Latin and French.
You know that did so much _, ood to my morale this was
a very intelligent looking boy and I was able to tell him that
was the last prize I won at School myself. Of course the
standards may have fallen in the meantime. ( Laughter)
But this does all of us good, to come along and revisit
the glimpses of the moon and recollect the time when we
were intelligent. ( Laughter) It is about that time that I
want to say a few words to the boys tonight.
When you senior b.) ys -o out into the affairs of life
you will find any number of people who will say to " Now
all that stuff that you have learned at school forget about
that; that's all old fashio-ned. Now you have to face the real
facts of getting a living and dealing with people".
I've hoard so many ' f them talk like that, the truth
of the matter being that those men who talk like that have never
learned anything since they left school. They caze out of
school with a little stock of things that they had learned, and
normally, with that little stock of things that they had learned,
provided the intelligence and the character and the decent
ambition, they c , uld ; o on learning and learning for years until
the very end of their lives.
Any man who has the benefit of an education, who isn't
a student at the age of 80, has wasted his time. I sometimes
think about people of that kind that they really think that
school is something to be got through.
Now what is it that we acquire at school? It is quite
true that you don't do a Law course, like me you do that after
you leave school; you don't study Medicine you may do some
Biology, or Chemistry, but you don't study medicine.
It is quite true that what you are doing is, in a
sense, though it doesn't always look it, elementary compared to
what will be attacked later on.
3ut the whole point about it is that this is a superb
discipline for the rLind. It really teaches us when we are at
school, to have some standards, to have things by which we can
measure other things good manners courtesy, intelligence, the
team spirit a willingness to subordinate personal interests to
the interests of the side, to the interests of the school.
These are all wonderful things. They are not childish.
They are never more needed than in the grown-up world.
You take the question of standards. We are living in
an ago of immense scientific research, particularly
technological research. Our friends in the Soviet Union fire off
satellites into the air they've even come to blows with the
moon so we're told. All this is supposed to be tremendous, and
a lot of people, in this country, and in other countries in the
free world say, " Well, you know, that shows they are getting ahead
of us". It would be very odd if they didn't get ahead of us in
something. But I want to say to everybody: Remember there ought
to be standards. Everything must be judged on some comparative
basis. A friend of mine who is in the diplomatic world and
from another country said to me one night in Canberra, " You know,
the moral effect on the people of various Asian countries, of
seeing these satellites passing across the sky, the moral effect
politically, will be tremendous". 3ut I said, " My friend, you
are forgetting that but for the work of the microbiologists the
medical scientists of the Wostern world, a lot of them wouldn't
be alive to see the satellite". You see, you must always have
some comparative standard in your mind.
Right around the world we see and it's not now,
though I think perhaps it's more acute than it was that one
of the great standards appears to be ' How much money does he
earn? How much money does he laboriously accumulate?' I would
like to say to my t:, oys lown there, I hope they don't succumb to
that silly idea. Judging by some of the people I've seen who
have made a lot of money, I don't think it can be too difficult.
( Laughter) I've seen other people who made immense fortunes by
tremendous constructive work for the country, and I admire them
not because they have made a fortune, but because of their
constructive work for the country.
3.
3ut don't worry about that kind of thing. Make up your
minds that right through your life you are going to know
something if possible better than the man next to you. You are
going to continue to be a student. You are not going to be
laughed out of it by being told that now you are a man you must
put away childish things. This is the most terrible of all
fallacies. Above all, don't succumb to the national pastime of
being cynical about other people's motives. You remember that
J. M. Jarrie made a magnificent speech years ago at the rectorial
address, it was, at St. Andrew's. I've always kept it near me
and I read it ab,-ut once a year, perhaps not with all the benefit
that I should take from it, but I read it once a year. land I
once had the , reat honour of talking with 3arrie about it for a
couple of hours in a country house in England.
But one of the flashing sentences in that speech was,
' Never ascribe to your opponent motives lower than your own'.
When I hear in the political world people eagerly alleging that
somebody has been personally corrupt, I suspect very deeply
whether he isn't. Never ascribe to an opponent, motives lower
than your own.
You may have to fight your opponent; you may have to
denounce him from time to time that's all in the game of life
and you must be courageous and have a good spirit.
Jut the silly cynicism which disfigures so many
people's minds, the kind of cynicism which produces the statement
" Oh, well, yes, I know he's supposed to be doing it for nothing,
but there must be something that he's after". You hear it said
about municipal councillors, poor chaps. I always thought that
they gave an immense amount of service to their locality, and
did it for free, as they say. J3ut, " Oh, no, you can't tell me;
there must be something".
Now the follow who says that has never done a hand's
turn for the country in his life.
Don't belong to that group of people. Go through your
lives, firmly persuaded that people can, and do perform unselfish
acts just as you have seen your school fellows perform them for
year after year in the school. Go through your life still
believing that. 3ocause if you do, the whole of your life will be
sweetened, and the life of Australia will be sweetened, because
our standards will have risen. We will have come more and more
firmly to have certain things that we passionately believe in,
and that we won't run away from. This is the essence of having
standards. Now, I think if you don't mind, I'll leave it at
that and get on with the part of the proceedings which always
appeals to me in my dual capacity I'm , iving away things that
other people have paid for ( Laughter) and in my dual capacity
as a Presbyterian and as a politician, I appreciate both.
( Laughter, applause)