!i PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 



comrades from other countries. At home, the efforts of those who 

 have earnestly devoted themselves — and especially the women — to 

 the tasks of providing for the reinforcement and support, for the 

 encouragement and comfort of our splendid representatives in 

 the trenches, in hospitals and training-camps, and, alas, in some 

 cases in prison-camps, as well as for those who are getting ready 

 to leave us to enter upon active service abroad, have been bej^ond 

 praise. The War Loans have been well supported, and the 

 response has been wide-spread. We are well aware that the 

 critical stage of the gigantic struggle is approaching; and that 

 though the Allies are now thoroughly awakened, resolute, and in 

 earnest about settling it in the right way, the task may be ex- 

 pected to be arduous, and the cost heavy. 



And yet here, in New South Wales especially, keeping all 

 this in mind, when have we, in other respects, contributed 

 so poor and sordid a chapter to our annals, as the record of 

 the last twelve months'? It has been said that the whole art of 

 politics is the art of seeing, and that party is the dust 

 which gets into the eyes of the politicians' understanding, and 

 mars their intellectual vision. But politics cannot claim a 

 monopoly of the art of seeing straight as the prelude to going 

 straight and acting straight. Every other department of human 

 activity is just as much in need of this accomplishment. The 

 intrusion of the party-spirit, degenerating at times into the 

 faction-spirit, has been responsible for a deplorable deterioration 

 in the standards and methods of our public life, and has culmin- 

 ated in depriving Australia of representation on the Imperial 

 War Conference. We have failed to rise whole-heartedly to 

 important occasions in a very great crisis, apparently because we 

 happen to be geographically situated on the outer edge of the 

 outer war-zone, instead of inside the inner war-zone. . 



I would remind you of our absent Soldier-Members. Eight of 

 those mentioned in my last address are still abroad on active 

 service, and were all well when he heard last. At the Meeting 

 in September, we had the pleasure of welcoming back Mr. C. F. 

 Laseron, who had seen service in Gallipoli and elsewhere, and is 



