Graduation Address

"Convocation address delivered by The Right Honourable Lord Shawcross at UNB" (9 October 1968). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

I want at the very outset to express the very great pride and pleasure I have in becoming, and not by examination, I could never have made the grade - a member of this great university, now nearing the end of its second century. And I can say not only for myself but on account of my fellow honorary graduands, we shall all esteem this distinction very highly, and I shall cherish it all the more warmly in that the honour comes from a university with which the late Lord Beaverbrook, and now his son, a distinguished son of a distinguished father, have been so closely associated.

When I started out in politics it was, of course, on the opposite side of the political fence to Lord Beaverbrook. Some day I shall tell the story of the great magnanimity and generosity he showed me at a moment when, had he been a small man, he might have wrecked my political career. But political differences did not prevent my becoming a devoted friend. Lord Beaverbrook is now a legend, and not only in this university. And so with his son, your present Chancellor, when after his gallant career in the RAF he came into the House of Commons we were on different sides. I suspect he found the party game as little satisfying as I did. At all events, as so often happens in politics, we soon discovered many fundamental things on which we thought alike.

Today, although he's not here, he presumably thinks I am entitled to this degree. Who am I to think differently? But like all of you, I particularly regret his absence today. He came to see us off at the airport on Monday and had he followed his own inclination he would certainly have come. But it happened that during his war days in the RAF he had got to know well the present Prime Minister of Rhodesia about the future constitutional arrangements in which country the United Kingdom Government has had such a bitter quarrel, bedevilling world relations. Your Chancellor, in the last month or two, realizing the growing gravity of the position has played a personal and private part in bringing about a meeting between the two Prime Ministers, taking place at this very moment at Gibraltar. Naturally, Sir Max felt that it was his duty to stay and see the meeting through. We may all hope and pray that it will bring an end to the quarrel within the Commonwealth, the blame for which does not lie only on one side.

You are fortunate in your chancellor. He possesses great moral as well as physical courage. He does and says what he thinks right and he shares in many ways the enthusiasms and applauds the aspirations of youth. We may miss him today but we can rejoice at the reason for his absence.

Now I must avoid the field of nostalgic reminiscence into which it is so easy to fall and say something about you.

And first let me congratulate you on being what you are - the undergraduates, staff, and parents associated with this enlightened and progressive university, in these fine buildings set in their lovely surroundings - a veritable oasis of serene learning in what may sometimes seem an ugly and arrid world but to what is in reality one of unprecedented opportunity and excitement. And particularly I congratulate those of you who have today taken your degrees. In some American universities this occasion is called Commencement, and so, in a very real sense, for you it is, for tomorrow you go from this place to commence the adventure of your lives in the real world outside. To pursue the path of service, certainly; of fortune, I hope, and perhaps of fame. Is it a bad world into which you go? Not so. But it is not an easy world. In the international field there is a great cleavage between those who cling to our heritage of freedom, and those born to and dragooned in tyranny. Wars and threats of wars, civil strife, violence, murder, and sudden death. Moreover, there is a terrible and still fast-growing disparity between the rich nations and the poor. There is no cause here for isolation or despair. World conditions are rather a challenge to our constructive vision, our tolerance, our idealism, and not least, our sturdy common sense.

I shall return to world affairs but let me first come nearer home. What sort of a world is it on which you are commencing in our own countries, yours and mine? Again, I say it is not a bad world, although it is not an easy one. Do not allow yourselves to be fooled. There is, it is true, a class of professional denigrators, of muck-rakers who deliberately make money out of destroying the old beliefs and traditions, jeering at honest and earnest men, tearing down the things which in the past we've held dear, and constructing nothing but anarchy in their place. In my country, even in some of the universities, which should be, as I said this one was, serene oases of learning where students and teachers can discuss and explore together in the quiet and tolerant pursuit of truth, there have been small minorities who have sought to cause disruption and dissention. Their tactics have been entirely counter-productive in regard to their own objectives, if they had any. But, alas, they have done grave damage to the public esteem in which the universities, paid for by the public, ought to be held.

You might sometimes think that crime and greed, and violence, and lust, and sex were commonplaces of our society. Not so. For every squalid, sordid of violent thing you read about or even see glamorized, hundreds of thousands of people in all walks of life, usually unhonoured and unsung, are pursuing their callings or their studies, living their lives honourably, happily, and usefully, to their fellow men. And never has there been a time when the need for service and the opportunities for achievement were greater than today. Tennyson might say a hundred years ago that science moves slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point. In the last thirty years, there has been a bursting out and blossoming, a veritable explosion of scientific knowledge and technology, undreampt of in his day and incredible to the lay-mind even in ours.

You here will be reaching the peak of your careers as the world turns into the 21st century, with developments of which even today, in this time of vastly accellerated development, we cannot dream. In this exciting world, each of you, answering to his own conscience, can be the master of his fate, with the advantage of your time in this university, in whatever field of human activity you choose to pursue - science, the arts, the professions, scholarship, commerce, the service of the state, there is no position to which, subject only to your own endeavour and capacity, you may not reasonably aspire, no glittering prize you need consider outside your ambition. What are the prizes? These I shall not catalogue. But I spoke of answering to your conscience and I would just say this. Not all the prizes are material ones. One which sometimes eludes us in the serenity which comes from the knowledge that one has done one's best to contribute to the happiness and welfare of mankind. But of this, you can be sure. The prizes, whatever they may be will not come to you by sitting on your backsides. If they quote Ecclesiastes that the race is not always to the swift, the answer is that the race is to the person who wins it. Run fast.

Today at this university the special theme is the law. You have this new faculty building, dignified and beautiful. You have honoured with your degrees particularly men whose field of activity has been the law. And I rejoice that you are studying law in the atmosphere of a university which can never be merely utilitarian in outlook but in which the cross-fertilization of the various disciplines encourages students to look to the unity of scholarship and knowledge. You see, approached merely as a vocational technique, the law can be a narrowing and tedious pursuit, a priggish and venal trade. Others more learned than I have spoken here and will study in the law faculty, the function of the lawyer in society. They have, I know, been concerned especially with the place and philosophy of the law, in the domestic field. I would like to trespass now on the field of international law, a subject which has been a particular concern of mine in Government, at the United Nations, at the International Court and in international academic work. Here, as elsewhere, the danger is making the better the enemy of the good. We have been assiduously canvassing such slogans as law not war or world peace through world law. And I think most laymen and even some lawyers think mainly of international law as something which would outlaw and prevent war. Alas, that is an illusion. The law has indeed outlawed wars since the Pact of Paris in 1928, but it hasn't prevented it. Military war on a world scale is unlikely now, not because of the Pact of Paris, not because of the Nuremburg Judgement, not because all men regard it as totally wrong - do the Chinese? - But because we all know that any general war would accomplish nothing but the destruction of civilization. This is the rule of terror rather than the rule of law. But things being as they are, I'm glad that we have it. I believe that if we maintain our strength and viligance [sic], war on a world scale will not happen. Don't let the fear of it upset the even tenor of your lives. Of course, this is an over-simplication [sic] but it is the only basis for discussion. At the end of the day there will either be a world war or there won't. If there is, tarpuis. You and I will hardly be amongst those present to argue about why it took place. But if there isn't, what then? How can all the problems which divide the world be solved? Rejection of the military solution of the world's problems, multiplied as they are, leaves the problem still. Can we look to world law to solve them? Not so. In some it can help. It cannot resolve. The rule of law involves far more than rules of law. It is not only a matter of courts and of police, still notably unacceptable in the international field. We talk of law and order, but historically order precedes law. The reason why in our free national societies men are willing to accept law is not primarily because of fear of the police, but because we recognize that the laws are generally just, and that if they are not, if they become outmoded, inappropriate, there is an acceptable legislature to alter them. This situation is not reproduced in the international field. The United Nations may have its uses as a forum for debate or blowing off steam. With its present voting procedures leading to double standards and irresponsibility, there is not a chance that it will be accepted as a world parliament. Nor is the alteration of its constitution and the establishment of a weighted system of voting a matter of practical politics at this time. While this is so, the slogan of world peace through world law remains a slogan - admirable, something to be pursued, but a slogan still. Do not suppose that I am decrying the importance of international law. Indeed I am not. It may be a somewhat haphazard body of rules but customary international law has been supplemented by a network of treaties and considerable progress has been made by institutional methods. In matters in which conflicting national interests are not so acute as to be incapable of resolution by agreement, there is a vast field being slowly covered by a network of international treaties which the nations are content to accept as binding. This is the current and progressive field of international law. We cannot agree with all nations about all things, and least of all about the establishment of world rule of law assimilated to our national systems. But the fact that we cannot agree with all nations does not mean that we should not all agree with any. I recall the words of a great British Foreign Minister, Mr. Ernest Bevin, "We must agree with those with whom we can agree. We must try to reproduce amongst as many nations as we can the kind of conditions which secure common consent to the rule of law in our own national societies." I would like to think that we in the North Atlantic, and I do not mean in any strictly geographical sense. I am thinking of the like-minded nations of the western world and particularly those, who, whatever their nationality or tongue, share the Norman-Anglo-Saxon traditions, or to move towards more concrete arrangements for cooperation in the social, economic, the legal, and the political fields, so that we shall create a microcosm, but a mighty one, of what some day the whole world might become. That I suppose is a political question and this is not the moment to enlarge upon it.