Graduation Address

"An address by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of Great Britain" (22 October 1970). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Premier, Fellow Honorary Graduates. Members of the University, Ladies and Gentlemen: -

I am honoured today, Mr. President, to be able to speak on behalf of the 1970 vintage of graduands of Canada’s oldest university.

It is true that some of us this afternoon owe our honorary degree to the generosity of the University, while so many on behalf of whom I speak – on whom you will be conferring the degrees, Mr. President, in a few minutes – have earned their degrees the hard way.

Those of us in public life in the Parliaments of the Commonwealth, are, from time to time, presented with honorary doctorates, and I deeply appreciate the one conferred on me today. More than 30 years ago, before most of those present today were born, I was myself working for a doctorate which, if the war had not intervened, I might have earned by my own efforts, under the supervision of the great British social reformer, Sir William Beveridge, whose name I am sure is still respected in Canada today.

The title of my thesis at Oxford – still on the books but still incomplete – is registered in the archives of the University as "The Demand for Labour in Great Britain". I have since spent the last 30 years working on that same subject, though in political terms the demand for Labour in Great Britain is essentially a fluctuating phenomenon. But today, I am going to speak though so many here could do it better, to and on behalf of the newer generation who today received their degrees, Mr. President, at your hand. Most of them will no doubt go from here into a wider world, others will stay on to enrich through their research the scientific and literary heritage of this University, which over the years has contributed to the life of Canada and the world.

There is, I think, not one new graduand here today who would regard his or her privilege of being educated here as merely a vocational training, as merely a means to a job, to an assured income. Not one who thinks of his or her future simply in terms of taking part in that ritual described in a once popular song where all go out from receiving their degrees to live in little boxes, in which every generation after generation grows up, "goes to university", settles down, and produces a new generation to repeat the whole process again.

Or as you, this afternoon’s vintage, go out into the world, you are thinking today of the contribution you are going to make to the life of this exciting and proud member of the Commonwealth, Canada; exercising your innate talents, developed as they have been by your period here, in whatever vocation of profession you may have chosen, but still more determined to prove yourself an active member of the community. You will enter on these tasks proud of Canada. Proud of a country greater in area even than your southern neighbour and limitless in its potentialities. It is the responsibility of this generation – not your and mine, Mr. Chancellor – to insist that what it potential becomes a reality.

You’ll go from here proud of the University of which today you and I are equally graduands. Its antiquity and equally its modernity are recognized. There are some, I think, who have accepted the legend that the University was founded by Lord Beaverbrook in 1785. I am glad that his son presides today as Chancellor. He and I, while not derogating from the contribution which that distinguished son of Canada made to this University and to this Province, know as you do that the University dates from a period when those who were then refusing to follow the revolting colonials to the south, were conscientiously embarking on creating a new country in North America which was to lead, rather more than 80 years later, to the British North America Act which created the independent country of Canada.

We live in an age when the media of communication – not of course those over whom you preside, Mr. Chancellor – choose to characterize the world’s undergraduate society as consisting largely of drop-outs, of hippies, of those who withdraw from the disciplines of modern society, by recourse to drugs, or who are equally intoxicated by the varying doctrines of the well-known leader of youth, Chairman Mao, of Mr. Castro and of a well-known sociologist from California. This is the account of the world’s undergraduate populations which we too often see through the media of communication.

It is in fact a caricature, but it is one considered rewarding by certain reactionary politicians on both sides of the Atlantic whose stock-in-trade is an attack on intellectual and liberal doctrines.

To disagree with particular doctrines or political theories, as I do in respect to some I’ve just mentioned, is not to decry their value in making men think.

Each generation of undergraduates will create or adopt their own gods, and fashion their own ideals. But that does not prevent the vast majority of our students combining with their individual political views, a binding loyalty to the multi-racial Commonwealth and to the world community.

This generation – you who are ending perhaps the first stage of your higher education – represents a generation of protest. If it were not so, there are many of us older ones on this platform who wouldn’t have much time for it. I belong, as a matter of fact, to a movement dedicated to protest, a movement which also has claimed – and if I may say so, will claim again – all the responsibilities of government. Those who have graduated in philosophy today will have learned, as I learned, as I stumbled through the works of Immanuel Kant, that intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty and hollow. In the 1970’s in which we live, equally, protest without responsibility is blind, responsibility without protest is empty.

If you have expressed protest here as undergraduate, I hope you will carry this forward into your future work. But you have learned responsibility too, and it is not only the responsibility of self-discipline but a responsibility involving wider loyalties to family and community, to province, to your country, to the Commonwealth and to the world.

As one who had the honour of presiding not very many months ago over the greatest Commonwealth Conference we have ever known, with the leaders of 28 sovereign countries playing their part, I ask all here not to under-rate what this Commonwealth of ours can mean to the world.

Round the table at Marlborough House sat leaders from Asia and Africa, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, North America and Europe, the Indian Ocean and Australasia. But more important. Round that table sat 28 men and women, leaders of their country, black, white, brown, yellow, representing countries, some very rich, some among the poorest in the world. They represented something like one-fifth of all the number of states represented at the United Nations; something like a quarter of the world’s population.

No organization in the world apart from the U.N. itself knows better the realities that lie behind all the issues which dominate world politics today. The problem of human rights, of race and colour; the problem of poverty and inequality beset the domestic life in almost every individual country. But still more it is these two inter-related problems, race and colour, poverty and inequality, which have now come to dominate international relations, and world relations.

Many years ago at our Commonwealth Conferences – it is now well over 20 years since I attended my first under Lord Atlee’s chairmanship – it was the voice of the strong and powerful that was listened to, as we discussed the problems and obsessions of the old democracies. Today the rich and powerful have most to learn about the leading world issues from those to whom problems of colour, problems of poverty, are not items on an agenda, but problems they live with every day of their lives.

It would be an achievement if this was all that happened at such a conference. For on whatever issues we may disagree, whatever the strains to which the Commonwealth is subject, we have gone beyond mutual education; we have shown a united resolve on how these problems of colour and poverty must be tackled on a world scale.

That is why the Commonwealth will reject with contempt the actions of any who seek to take us back to a world where human equality and human dignity counted for so little. Or to create a world which cynically accepts a double standard of values in matters of race and human rights.

For if I have the right to be proud of what Britain has done from the days when Prime Minister Atlee led the world forward from imperialism to the concept of the modern Commonwealth, so equally Canadians have the right to be proud of what your Prime Ministers, of both political parties, have achieved for the Commonwealth.

It was a Canadian Prime Minister whose insistence that there could not be two sets of standards within the Commonwealth led to the exclusion of South Africa. And on every issue affecting race and colour his successors as Prime Ministers of Canada have given leadership in fighting for those who were oppressed.

Within our Commonwealth relationship I hope each of is here will feel called upon to do everything in our power to strengthen the relations between our two countries, as well as our wider relationship within the Commonwealth.

Today, your Honour, all of us in Britain feel ourselves to be sharing in the anguish, the tragedy, the challenge, which Canada is facing, and joining with all in Canada in condemning this brutal, senseless act of assassinations.^*

But more than that, we know what it means when a country respected throughout the world for its civilized system of society, is itself brought up against this dangerous development which has spread from country to country, in which violence and terrorism are invoked as weapons in a political struggle.

Every Briton feels himself a part of Canada today. Each one of us will wish to see Britain and Canada standing still more closely together in the years ahead.

Each of us has shown how it is possible to reconcile tradition and our essential democratic beliefs with an ability not only to accept but to speed the process of change.

Britain is old in tradition, in the contribution we have made to world democracy, in our ability to live together in local and national communities. But we are eternally young, eternally virile, eternally giving a lead to the world in science and technology – even though your southern neighbours have reaped many of the dividends from what they have learned from us. But even more in the civilized virtues which proclaim to the world the basis on which, within nations and between nations, peoples of different races, can live together. The overspill of British domestic political controversies in an age when British newspapers can be read on the breakfast tables of the North American continent may animate and inform a readership in Canada and the United States, but you will be wrong to read from these controversies any sense of doubt in the future Britain. Whatever else we may argue about in Britain, we are not arguing about that! For we have in our power the ability to lead the thinking of democratic countries in the solution of problems common to all those countries, and no less in the issues which divide the world community.

It is axiomatic that the world has become smaller. When I prepared this speech last week I was going to tell you at what speed I arrived here by aircraft from London. And if we had left London at lunchtime yesterday, we should have been here yesterday evening. In fact I spent six hours enjoying the scenery of London Airport. We shall be back in London, God willing and BOAC, at breakfast time tomorrow.

But in fact an aircraft jointly developed by Britain and France and now flying at super-sonic speed would be capable of bringing you, Mr. Chancellor, and myself here and back from London in considerably less than twenty-four hours.

The truth us that modern technology has now reduced this vast world to the size of a parish before we have begun to live together as neighbours.

Before I had the honour of wearing the robes of this University, I was wearing in the hall the robes of the Chancellor of the University of Bradford, England. A University sending out into Britain and the world increasing numbers of graduates trained not only in the science of our modern age, but graduates trained equally in the humanities, without which, modern science and technology are not only a delusion but a danger.

A century-and-a-half before this University was founded, and English writer was proclaiming that no man is an island. We are all members one of another. We share common problems. In world organizations, Canada has joined with us and with others in proclaiming the dangers arising from the pollution which modern industrial technology has created. In Canada it is in part, but not entirely, a problem of a danger to the ecology of your Northern waters. But this is not all. The Canadian economy itself has, like the British economy, become a part of a wider international system of economic and industrial power, where the doctrine of production at all costs can enslave those who have made that production possible. Not only atmospheric pollution, but the psychological pollution in which the lives of individuals and the dreams of our children can be sacrificed to a remorseless drive for efficiency and profit.

In a very real sense, we live in a world where the ordinary man feels helpless when facing remote and almost overwhelming economic power. It is true in our continent of Europe; it is true in your American continent. It is the duty of those who go from this University and other universities in the world, be they graduates in industrial efficiency, be they graduates in the social services, be they graduates in the humanities, to defend the individual against the insolence of that economic power.

Each of us has to ask ourselves what that means in the vocation which we have just chosen. It may be an industrial vocation where too easily efficiency and profit can call the tunnel it may be a vocation involving a social responsibility to the community. In either case it is our duty to resist that arrogation of efficiency and profit regardless of human values. It is a challenge no less to those who go into the world to assert the essential humanities which philosophy and literature must ever assert against material values.

But it brings with it a wider challenge. There are those who assert that private profit, the search for ever-mounting efficiency, the paramount essentials of individuals or family prosperity, must override all other considerations. Each of us is responsible, in a modern community, for our neighbours. If any one of our neighbours suffers hardship or want, it must be the duty of each member of the community to come to his assistance.

Not long ago, I was in Scotland, from where so many people came to colonise Canada in the days when almost every family was facing starvation. But the law of the community in Scotland, in Wales and in England, as in the early days of Canada, provided that when anyone was facing acute difficulties, out of the exiguous resources of each family something must be made available for his help.

It was that sense of responsibility which led to the creation of Britain’s system of social security, which has been a model for the world, which Canada is now moving rapidly towards creating, and which whatever the exigencies and arguments of politics south of the border, will be the future of the United States. A system of society in which the problems of age will become the concern of all. A system of society going far beyond social provision, in which the community as a whole must defend an individual against the demands of almost overwhelming and certainly overweaning economic power.

So my message to my fellow graduands is this – be proud of you country, regard it as your task to release your enormous economic potentialities for the good of the community; be proud of the Commonwealth of which Canada has throughout the years been so leading a member; recognize how much in the future Canada can give the lead in the fight against those who would seek to destroy what generations of your country and mine have created; recognize the ties which bind our two countries; recognize equally that whatever internal controversies may divide your country or mine, Britain is still Great Britain and Canada would be wrong ever to write it off.

In a still wider sense recognize that we are member of a great Commonwealth community where advanced countries such as your country and mine have a responsibility to play a full part in the revolution which has overtaken the world within our generation. For this is a revolution which underlines the duty which each of us has to provide for the development of countries which for centuries have lived in hunger. But one which means equally that our community and the world community cannot survive, still less prosper, unless we, and each individual one of us, assert the essential freedoms. The freedom from want and hunger, and above all the freedom from contempt.

This must be our answer to a world in which the old conflict between nations has become outdated and has been replaced by a conflict in which the cause of human rights and human equality must be asserted by every one of us.

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^*Mr. Wilson was referring to the October 1970 FLQ murder/kidnappings of British and Quebec government officials.