Your second blessing is that you carry in your land’s history and in your hearts the strongest instinct of inherited continuity, which expresses itself in your passionate interest in your own folk, your own race and all its values. History shows that, from remote ages, the Scots would descend from their heather and associate together on the flat for predatory purposes; these now take the form of raiding the world in all departments of life--and governments. But at intervals your race, more than others, feel the necessity for owning itself. Therefore it returns, in groups, to its heather, where, under camouflage of “games” and “gatherings,” it fortifies itself with the rites, incantations, pass-words, raiment, dances, food and drink of its ancestors, and re-initiates itself into its primal individualism. These ceremonies, as the Southern races know to their cost, give its members fresh strength for renewed forays. And that same strength is your third and chief blessing. I have already touched on the privilege of being broken by birth, custom, precept and example to doing without things. This is where the sons of the small houses who have borne the yoke in their youth hold a cumulative advantage over those who have been accustomed to life with broad margins. Such men can and do accommodate themselves to straitened circumstances at a pinch, and for an object; but they are as aware of their efforts afterwards as an untrained man is aware of his muscles on the second morning of a walking tour; and when they have won through what they consider hardship they are apt to waste good time and place by subconsciously approving, or even remembering, their own efforts. On the other hand, the man who has been used to shaving, let us say, in cold water at seven o’clock the year round, takes what one may call the minor damnabilities of life in his stride, without either making a song about them or writing home about them. And that is the chief reason why the untrained man always has to pay more for the privilege of owning himself than the man trained to the little things. It is the little things, in microbes or morale, that make us, as it is the little things that break us. Also, men in any walk of life who have been taught not to waste or muddle material under their hand are less given to muddle or mishandle moral, intellectual, and emotional issues than men whose wastage has never been checked, or who look to have their wastage made good by others. The proof is plain. Among the generations that have preceded you at this University were men of your own blood--many and many--who did their work on the traditional sack of peasemeal or oatmeal behind the door--weighed out and measured with their own hands against the cravings of their natural appetites.