Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan

"As a trustee of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland I have read many applications for help in the payment of University class fees on behalf of would-be students from crofts in the remotest regions of the Highlands and Islands. It was impossible to read them without emotion and admiration, for they displayed in their simple words a spirit of courage and of aspiration undaunted by hardship which went to ones heart."

"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 ones heart out in idleness. There are many occupations which can be devised to improve ones fitness to profit by the chance when it does come."

"In those days there were no Scottish Q.C.s or K.C.s, though it was customary to confer the rank of Queens Counsel on the Lord Advocate of the day by admitting him to the English roll of silks... the Scottish roll of Queens Counsel was instituted... in 1897."

"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."

"No question of priority arose to embarrass me in my loyalties to the railway companies until the Parliamentary session of 1924-25... In Scotland the Dean of Faculty [of Advocates] is the deciding authority... He pointed out that the L.M.S. Company which was claiming me was not the L.M.S. Company which had retained me... So I was awarded to the L.N.E.R. and duly appeared in the Committee Rooms on their behalf."

"The wide experience to be gained at the Scots Bar has its advantages. It does not enable one to become such an expert in any single department as the English specialist... but it tends to a sound knowledge of the legal principles common to all branches of the law. The Scottish Judges have always been more interested in principle than in precedent and the Bar have conformed to this lead. In the House of Lords this feature of Scottish advocacy has been often remarked and admired."

"Thus the facilities (of the Advocates Library), which in England were provided at the taxpayers expense in the British Museum, were in Scotland afforded entirely at the cost of the Scottish Bar... Much the greater part of their annual income was expended in maintaining it."

"During the long interval which elapsed before the revival and reconstitution of the Secretary-ship in 1885, `the Lord Advocate of the day was really Minister for Scotland. The technical right to control Scottish affairs in their various departments no doubt belonged to the various Ministers of the Crown; but so little was known in London about Scotland and the country was in so distrubed and backward a condition that responsibility was easily devolved upon the only man who knew or cared much about the subject."

"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."

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

"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."

"This was no doubt due in part to economic reasons, for Scotland before the era of modern industrial developments was a poor country and brains and brawn were among its few merchantable assets. Hence, on the one hand, the rewarding eminence attained by so many Scots beyond their own borders in the worlds of scholarship, commerce, and administration... and hence, on the other hand, the fame of the achievements of the Scots on the Continent as soldiers of fortune in the wars of Europe, a valorous reputation subsequently so well maintained by the Highland Regiments in the service of the British Crown."