As a mark of the high esteem in which he is held by the citizens of Edinburgh, in testimony of his valuable services to the city, and in recognition of his brilliant and distinguished career as Principal of the University of Edinburgh during a period marked by exceptional difficulty on account of the war and also by unprecedented development and expansion of the University.
"It seems incredible to look back over a vista of 58 years to the time when I first came to Edinburgh, a shy and friendless student, to enter the University. There were giants in those days. At least to my boyish eyes they seemed so. Some of them I still believe were giants. There was Tait, there was Fleeming Jenkin, who was more than a merely inspiring teacher, and quickly became a personal friend, and through the medium of these two I entered into relations with a still greater giant than ever, the late Lord Kelvin.
Towards the end of the Sixteenth century, in a seething time, a time of conflict and difficulty, when Scotland was still growing from the influence of Knox and Buchanan, the influence of the Reformation, the City Fathers of the period pursued consistently and strongly a policy of establishing an institution in which the higher education might be given in their own city, and at last, after much difficulty, they achieved their purpose, and in 1583 the College was opened. The College afterwards came to be recognised and developed into great fame throughout the world as the University of Edinburgh. It was a time of intellectual ferment and the town council of that day not only established the College but went on to cherish it and to foster it. They went on cherishing it and fostering it for a period of no less than 275 years.
But we are concerned to-day not with ancient, but with modern history. Reference has been made to the period of thirteen eventful years during which I have had such a happy association not only with my colleagues of the University, of the Senatus and the Court, but also I have been peculiarly happy in my relations with the City and with the Lord Provost's predecessors. That association has always been a source of pleasure, of inspiration and strength. From the citizens, all the unofficial citizens of Edinburgh, I have had an immense measure of moral and material support."
[In June of the previous year Sir Alfred delivered an address to the Institution of Civil Engineers, and what follows is from that prophetic oration.]
"The fact remains that all our efforts to apply the sources of power in Nature to the use and convenience of man, successful as they are in creating for him new capacities, new comforts, new habits, leave him at bottom much what he was before. I used, as a young teacher, to think that the splendid march of discovery and invention, with its penetration of the secrets of Nature, its consciousness of power, its absorbing mental interest, its unlimited possibilities of benefit, was in fact accomplishing some betterment of the character of man. I thought that the assiduous study of engineering could not fail to soften his primitive instincts; that it must develop a sense of law and order and righteousness. But the War came, and I realised the moral failure of applied mechanics. It was a shock to find that a nation's eminence in this department of intellectual effort did nothing to prevent a reversion to savagery, conscienceless, unbridled, made only more brutal by its vastly enhanced ability to hurt. I saw that the wealth of products and ideas with which the engineer had enriched mankind might be prostituted to ignoble use. It served to equip the nations with engines of destruction incomparably more potent and ruthless than any known before. We had put into the hand of civilisation a weapon far deadlier than the weapons of barbarism, and there was nothing to stay her hand. Civilisation, in fact, turned the weapon upon herself. The arts of the engineer had indeed been effectively learned, but they had not changed man's soul. In our diligent cultivation of these arts we engineers have perhaps forgotten that progress in them has far outstripped the ethical progress of the race. We have given the child a sharp-edged tool before he has the sense to handle it wisely. We have given him the power to do irreparable mischief when he hardly knows the difference between right and wrong. Does it not follow that the duty of leadership is to educate his judgment and his conscience? Collective moral sense, collective political responsibility, the divine maxim to do to others as we would that they should do unto us - these are lessons in respect of which all the nations, even the most progressive. have still much to learn.
There are people who talk glibly of the next great war. I wonder if they know how near, in the last Great War, the world came to destruction through misapplying the endowment which it owes to the engineer. Do they realise that with added experience and further malignant ingenuity, the weapons of a future war will be more than ever deadly, more than ever indiscriminate, and the peril to civilisation will be indefinitely increased?
Surely it is for the engineer as much as any man to pray for a spiritual awakening, to strive after such a growth of sanity as will prevent the gross misuse of his good gifts. For it is the engineer who, in the course of his labours to promote the comfort and convenience of man, has put into man's unchecked and careless hand a monstrous potentiality of ruin."