of the new battalions: These things ought ye to have done; others ought ye not to have left undone. I hope in Edinburgh and Glasgow, before any new battalions are now started, that care will be taken to fill up the existing ones to their full strength. [Cheers.] And may I say I think this is only their due? The existing Territorial regiments have worked in time of peace and given their strength and their leisure to the service of their country, [Cheers.] They have really a higher claim upon us than those who have only enlisted since the war. [Hear, hear.]
Well, the second point, on which you did not touch, my Lord Provost, is the extreme expediency of raising one or more bantam battalions. [Cheers.] I am very strongly of opinion—I may be prejudiced—that a short man for every purpose of life is as good, and better than, a tall one. [Laughter and cheers.] The only purpose in which he is at a disadvantage is seeing in a crowd, and after all, that is only an accidental circumstance, and I venture to say that, for every practical purpose, a man of five feet in good health will make just as good a soldier as a man of six. In the third point I am venturing on more dangerous ground. I have come to the melancholy conviction, Lowlander as I am, that the best recruiting dress is the kilt. [Cheers.] I am not at all sure that much as I admire the kilt, if in the trenches I should not prefer the trews—[laughter]—but I am afraid that we cannot but acknowledge, and I do not know why we should desire to deny it, that there is nothing so magnificent in our Army as the swing of a kilted regiment, and I myself feel a violent wish to enlist and have the youth to enlist whenever I see one pass. [Cheers.] Now, can we accept that doctrine that our Scottish regiments should be kilted regiments? [Cries of "Yes" and "No."] I think I hear Bailie Nicol Jarvie—[laughter]—to whom, no doubt, it would be a grave trial to think it would be possible in the streets of Glasgow to meet a kilted regiment not there either for blackmail or for plunder, but we must submit to the exigencies of the time. Our kilt is a noble dress, and I am quite certain that, Lowlander and Highlander, there is none so near to the hearts of the Scottish people. [Cheers.]
Now I come to the more immediate purpose I am here for. I think on the nation to-day there is a twofold responsibility. There is the awful responsibility resting on every able, healthy, and competent man of due age to give his best services to his country. [Hear, hear.] That no one can blind himself to,
