In testimony of the respect and esteem of the Magistrates and Council and the Community for his personal character and as a distinguished Scotsman and neighbour, and in recognition of his eminent public services as a Statesman and man of letters and as occupying the high position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
"I propose to speak as a Scotsman to those who are his countrymen, and as one who has just become to most of them a fellow-citizen. I do not think that the conferring of the freedom of the Capital of Scotland can be otherwise than a great honour to any man, be he whom he may, or however his nationality may be separated from our own ; but to one who is himself a Scotsman and who all his life has lived within sight of Arthur Seat, the honour which Edinburgh has done him must appeal in a manner which nobody who is not a Scotsman and not a neighbour of your great city can adequately feel. I know not, ladies and gentlemen, why it is that Edinburgh appeals with the special and peculiar force with which it doubtless does appeal to every man who calls himself a Scotsman.
It is not merely the beauty, the unequalled beauty of its site, great as that is, and incapable as it seems of being spoiled either by the efforts of the railway engineer or the surburban architect. It certainly is not its climate-for one of the most brilliant and not the least loyal of its sons, Robert Louis Stevenson, evidently felt that even his patriotism was somewhat chilled by Princes Street in an East wind. It is something more and above either its external advantages or its external disadvantages which touches so deeply the springs of patriotic feeling which all Scotsmen here and abroad feel for the capital of their native country ; and I think the reason is partly to be found in the fact that Edinburgh, more than any other capital in the world, seems to express, doubtless in a softened and beautified form, the great characteristics of Scottish history . . .
What I want to call your attention to is the sudden blossoming out which followed the Revolution settlement and the union with our sister kingdom. It was as some Alpine upland when the snows have disappeared bursting out into a carpet of wild and brilliant blossom; so sudden, so immediate and so great was the change that took place. We did not love the Union - we must admit that. But we used it - and we used it to the infinite advantage of Scotland and of England, and of what is more than either Scotland or England - of the British Empire. Immediately our countrymen took their places in the true succession, in the true literary succession of British literature. But it is not merely in literature, it is in every department of activity that Scotland, which had done nothing up to the eighteenth century, after the eighteenth century seemed almost to do everything. In commerce, in banking, in farming, on the material side of life, a country whose poverty was proverbial, where whole regions were starved by successive inroads of hostile invaders, Scotland took the lead. And it took the lead in many other ways. It is curious to reflect that we gave to England the greatest judge which I think she has ever possessed - Lord Mansfield; that we gave to England the greatest advocate she has ever possessed - Lord Erskine; that we gave to England a Lord Chancellor, of whose intellectual qualifications I could say much, but on whose moral qualifications I prefer to be silent; that it was a Scotsman who was the only rival in eloquence to the elder Pitt, and that it was another Scotsman, afterwards Lord Melville, who was the right-hand man of the younger Pitt in his great Parliamentary struggles. But that is not all; that is not indeed, nearly all. We may truly say of philosophy that with the exception - the great exception as I admit it to be - of Bishop Berkeley, all British philosophy in the eighteenth century was Scottish philosophy, and that the title of Britain to take its rank among the thinking nations of the world was a title which it derived rather from those who were born north of the Tweed than from those who were born South of it.
I do not wish to recall names which, though they will always retain their place in the history of our country, are relatively insignificant compared to other titles to the gratitude of Britain and the world. For, mark you, our intellectual activities did not merely burst the narrow barrier of Scotland and overspread England in that century, but within the hundred years or less which followed the union we produced at least five names whose fame was not merely Scotch, or merely English, or merely insular, but which took their places in different departments of history and civilisation. There was a man, I fancy some of you may never have heard of him, who was a great scientific physical chemist, nevertheless, and professor in this city - Black ; there was the great scientific engineer, Watt; there was the great philosopher, Hume; there was the great poet, Burns; and I had almost omitted one, not the least famous of the five - there was the great economist, Adam Smith. And those five names stand, and will always stand, as great landmarks in the history of human culture, as men who opened new epochs, each in his respective department; will not stand merely as useful labourers in the field, but as those who guided the labours of their successors. Now, is not this one of the most remarkable and most modern changes of which national history gives any record? I at least know nothing like it. It is as sudden as the contrast between the cliffs on which the Castle stands, and the gardens of Princes Street into which they fall. And that brings me from my long and wandering parenthesis to what I hoped would be the theme of the few remarks which I intended to address to you.
What I feel is that the history, the character of which I have thus indicated to you, finds permanent expression in this city as the history of no other country finds expression in its capital. In Rome, the mistress of the world, you will find no doubt its history, but you will find it by the aid of elaborate excavation, the work of antiquaries, vast expenditure, ingenious reconstruction. Paris - which has had at least as close a connection with the history of France as had Edinburgh itself with the history of Scotland - Paris has been improved out of all recognition, so that no man visiting that great capital would be able in imagination to picture to himself what the Paris was of, let us say, Francis I, or Henry III, or of the Fronde. It is not so with Edinburgh. Not indeed by our own labours, but by the mere physical formation of the city, we see the different epochs still represented before us. We see what is old and what is new. At a glance we can take in the limits and picture to ourselves the character of the old walled city, the Castle at one end of the long street, Holyrood at the other; and can without any antiquarian assistance imagine the bloody and intolerant struggles which too often disgraced our streets, And at the same time we can see the new city spread out at its feet, we can see the whole evolution of Scottish civilisation, from the time when the preoccupation of every Scotsman was how to defend his home from the overwhelming power of his nearest neighbour, till the present day, when, still dominated by the Castle, the New Town gives proof that we have joined in heart and in civilisation with out ancient antagonists, that we have learnt from them all that they had to teach us, and I would venture to say have largely improved upon the lessons of our masters. My Lord Provost, it is thoughts like these which have made me feel how great is the honour which you have done me in enrolling me formally among your burgesses. Always have I counted myself among your well-wishers; always have I been your neighbour; always have I spent much of my time within your limits . . . you have enabled me so long as life lasts to call myself henceforth not merely a friend and a neighbour, but one of yourselves."