Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan Quotes

Mr. Gladstone characteristically replied that "the subject of the establishment of a national public library in Edinburgh will have every consideration from Her Majesty's Government', which signified precisely nothing, as the Faculty experienced when a few years later a renewed approach was made.

Early every morning a van calls to take his brief bag up to the Parliament House, where his papers are trustingly displayed in his box in the public corridor of the Courts and whence they are brought home again after the day's work.

I found ample scope in the work of the tribunals that were open to me, and in the House of Lords, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and the Parliamentary Committee Rooms. I enjoyed a large and varied practice, almost entirely in English cases and cases from the Dominions.

A member of the Bar is not entitled to refuse his services to anyone who seeks to employ him. He has been said to be like a cabman on the rank: it is his duty to place himself at the disposal of the first person who hails him and he has no right to exercise any discrimination... This principle also has its origin in the conception of the special position of the advocate in the public administration of justice. It is essential that no citizen should be unable to procure the adequate presentation of his case in Court, however unpopular or even unworthy he may be.

This was ultimately secured in a large chamber in the lower part of the Parliament House, known as the Laigh Parliament Hall, the traditional torture chamber of the Scottish Privy Council.

The promoters of every private bill have to satisfy the [Parliamentary] Committee that their proposals are sufficiently beneficial to the public to justify the Committee in entrusting them with the special powers necessary to carry them out; it is only on this condition that private rights and interests can be required to give way to public necessity. The task of the Committee is to examine the proposals from this point of view and for this purpose to hear the arguments and evidence both of the promoters and of thhe opponents, being specially vigilant to see that justice is done by way of compensation and protection to those who may be called upon to make sacrifices for the public benefit. The range of the subjects which may come before Parliament by way of private bill is immensely varied, including such matters as the construction of railways, the building of harbours and bridges, the extension of city boundaries, the development of water power and electricity, the provision of water supplies, and the alteration of the constitution and objects of charitable and educational institutions.

We had for our guide the wish of the founder [of the Pilgrim Trust] that we should devote ourselves specially to the conservation of the heritage of Britain, and we knew that this meant not only its material heritage of institutions and buildings and places of beauty and historical association, but also the nation's spiritual and intellectual heritage in the character and well-being of the people, then passing through the ordeal of widespread unemployment and distress, with all the accompanying risks of deterioration. So we regarded ourselves, as it were, as a salvage corps, and decided to divide our assistance between these two types of objects.

Propaganda, [the White Paper] said, "is a work which is peculiarly liable to miscellaneous criticism , since most men are apt to consider themselves born propagandists and are only too willing to point out where the official department fails."

Nothing is more fatal to success at the Parliamentary Bar than to attempt to suppress or misrepresent any point, for if the Committees lose confidence in a counsel's fairness the Parliamentary agents will soon desert him.

Security is a thing to be earned rather than bestowed. It should be the reward of adventure and effort.... So our education, if it is to inspire our youth to face life with courage and happiness, must concern itself with the ideals of duty and service rather than with securing an easy shelter from all risks.

Already in my own time the volume of business was much less than in the heyday of the Victorian age, when the developments of the industrial era stimulated the enterprise of promoters and led to the construction of our modern railways, docks, and other undertakings of public utility. That was the era which my friend Walter Elliot has so aptly called the `century of equipment'.

It seemed a wonderful thing to me to be a member of a great Faculty whose history and traditions went back to the earliest times and to be entitled to exercise a profession which I then thought and still think to require the highest gifts of mind and character for its worthy pursuit.

But while in these first years the prospects of success are apt to seem remote and high hopes seem doomed to frustration, the worst thing to do is to eat one's heart out in idleness. There are many occupations which can be devised to improve one's fitness to profit by the chance when it does come.

We found that success in each case depended largely on enlisting the services of an efficient and enthusiatic local organiser, director, or warden, and many of our grants took the form of paying the salary of such leaders. The results were seldom disappointing. The reports which we regularly received showed how responsive the people were to sympathy and practical help, and we felt amply rewarded.

Throughout my advocacy of the University's cause I had experienced the truth of Goethe's maxim that it is best, if you wish to influence people, to begin by assuming that they are already what you would have them to be.