87 
SOME OF THE CHANGES OF SOCIAL LIFE 
IN ENGLAND DURING THE LAST SIXTY YEARS. 
The Presidential Address given at the Annual Meeting of the 
Association at Ambleside, July, 1890, 
By THE RicHT REV. THE BISHOP OF BARROW-IN-FURNESS. 
Ir is my duty as filling the honorable office of President of this 
Association for the present year, to give a short address to you at 
your annual meeting. We are finishing this year one of the 
decades of the roth century—only ten years more remain to it. 
And the fact reminds me that if I live to see the end of the present 
century, I shall have reached the threescore years and ten, which 
are the ordinary limit of human life. As we grow older, anni- 
versaries are perhaps not such pleasant things as they were when 
we were young. We are more ready to look back to our own 
youth, and to think pensively of the times that are gone, than to 
look forward hopefully to the future. And so, my duty of giving 
an address to you to-day has set me thinking of the many and 
great changes that have passed over England since my own birth, 
just sixty years ago, and of the very different state of things which 
Surrounded me in my own childhood, and in the days of my 
earliest recollections. 
It is one of the privileges of advancing years to prose about the 
memories of youth. And at the risk of being egotistical, I should 
like to talk to you about some of those things, and (so far as can 
be done in a brief sketch) to compare the England of fifty or sixty 
