Consider the difficulties. Just what is Victoria College to be proud of after 50 years? Is it to be congratulated or blamed for Sir David Smith, Sir Bernard Freyberg and Mr. Will Appleton? Sir David solemnly assured the Students' Congress that the second-year American University student was the finest product of Western civilisation! Sir Bernard tells the people that anybody in New Zealand who doesn't agree with the social opinions of himself and his lady is a foreigner, while in his ten thousand speeches his Worship has never given cause for the slightest suspicion that he has ever come in contact with an institution of higher learning. Is it a source of pride to Victoria that it has turned out a regiment of men who defend right and wrong impartially for money—that is lawyers? I don't think so. It has always seemed to me that our College should be proud that it helped to educate a Gordon Watson, who became Secretary of the Communist Party, and who died gun in hand, fighting in Italy the things he hated in his own country. It has no reason to speak well of the type of man whom he satirised in his "Epitaph for a Liberal" in the 1937 "Spike" thus:

You were a gallant speaker
For freedom and for right
You were no common coward
Until you saw the fight.