A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IAM not using the word portent portentously when I say that the election of Canon Sheppard as Rector of Glasgow University is a portent. I simply mean that it portends something, as it obviously does. On the face of it Canon Sheppard, who got 538 votes, had no claim on Glasgow. He is not a prominent Scotsman, like Professor Macneile Dixon, who got 364, or a distinguished politician like Mr. Winston Churchill, who got 281, or a distinguished scientist like Professor Haldane, who got 220. He was just, as he would say, a pacifist parson—not a parson of the Church to which most of the Glasgow students presumably belong— and it was as a pacifist that they elected him in spite of his being a parson. To argue that only a quarter of the possible voters voted is quite irrelevant, unless it is assumed that the abstainers were predominantly anti-Sheppard, and for that there is no warrant at all. I cannot go all the way with Canon Sheppard, but I believe a great deal that is best in modern youth is responding to his appeal. His movement raises problems ; if it grows in this country and takes root nowhere else it may have disturbing effects. It could clearly take root in no country that is not a democracy.
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