We got to talking about socialism. "Its basis," he said, "is materialism, not man. Herbert Spencer said: 'By no political alchemy can you get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.' And that's a good standard for testing politicians. None better." Drummond was always looking at the bright side of life, illuminating it with common sense. And he loved a joke as well as anybody. He told with gusto of the fun he had at the Chicago Exhibition when, one evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode through the grounds, gazing gravely at the marvels of that western civilisation. "Marvellous," he repeated. "We shall never see anything like it again. Nor like those Arabs. If you could have seen them, as they passed from light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking {182} with laughter, they removed the sheets and pillow cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and colored tablecloths which had served them as robes and turbans and sashes, you would have said they were as marvellous as anything in the show. And when they wiped the colour from their faces, you would have recognised several of the most learned professors in America and one Scotsman with a smudge on his cheek." He roared at the recollection. He was a professor at twenty-five. And his pupils were university graduates studying for the ministry. It was part of their duty to study natural science, to know something about the world they would preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig science out of Scripture. Well, Drummond was the man for his work. And besides natural science, his work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising evangelicism. At the end of his week in the classroom he would run over to Edinburgh and hold a religious service with a thousand young men attending earnestly. "How do you get into personal touch with your college students?" I asked him. "There you touch a tender point," he said. "There is n't enough personal touch in the colleges of Scotland! We put too much faith in lectures. Young men come but rarely into personal touch with their professors. I knew very little of mine. And that's the rule. A man must break through the routine; the professor must, the student must. Personal touch would open both of them. Take So-and-So at the University. He lectures in the {183} morning to one hundred and fifty or two hundred students. In the afternoon to two hundred more. No personal touch in that; no opportunity for it. Youth can't be taught in droves, or saved in masses. And yet, if you go in for individual development, or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond all possibility. Our system is wrong. It neglects character for the sake of competition. But what can be done? Effort, individual effort, is the only thing worth a bawbee. All the rest is formulae."