5 NOVEMBER 1910, Page 3

Mr. Balfour attended a luncheon on Friday week in cele-

bration of the twenty-first anniversary of tho University Students' Union at Edinburgh, and delivered a short but sug- gestive speeoh on the social side of Scottish University life. It was not as a debating society, but as a common centre, at the most plastic time of life, for men of every kind of training, and drawn from every walk of life, that this Union was valuable. The Scottish Universities were, or were in old times, teaching institutions and nothing else, and the social life of the Uni- versity, as developed in the English Universities, was of necessity almost neglected. They could not reproduce the College system in a University organised on different lines; but this Union had filled up to perfection this gap in their academic structure. Its value would grow and increase as time went on, "until every man and woman connected with the University would feel that this institution was as necessary to the healthy life of the University as the most elaborate apparatus, lecture-rooms, laboratories, opportunities for experi- mental research, and all the rest of it, in which so great and admirable a development had recently taken place in Edinburgh."