text:  What is it that attracts strangers from every part of the world into this distant land and has more than compensated a remote situation and a churlish soil and given to our own Northern Isle a splendour unknown to the regions of the sun? What is it which has brought together this mighty assemblage and united the ardent and the generous from every part of the world from the Ural mountains to the banks of the Mississippi on the shores of an island in the Atlantic? My lord it is neither the magnificence of our cities nor the beauty of our valleys the animation of our harbours nor the stillness of our mountains; it is neither our sounding cataracts nor our spreading lakes; neither the wilds of nature we have subdued so strenuously nor the blue hills we have loved so well