My remarks this morning will be devoted mainly to general considerations and to principles. Dr. Topping and Mr. Verity are to deal with the courses in detail, but behind all that they say there must be a background of principle, and I hope that a statement of my creed will not find them active dissenters.

I take as my text a quotation from Ruskin which I placed on the flyleaf of a little book I wrote in 1925, and of the truth of which I am as convinced as ever—“Know what you have to do, and do it, for I believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.”