8 OPENING ADDRESS. 



and is endeavouring to to help forward bis neighbour and thereby 

 strengthen the nation. 



Richard Brinsley Sheridan has said "that a circulating library in 

 a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge," and in my 

 opinion there is some truth in this statement. One great draw- 

 back to educational advancement and the attaintjient of know- 

 ledge to-day is the class of literature with which the country is 

 flooded, i)ernicious in the extreme, inculcating false views of life 

 and of manhood and womanhood. To counteract this evil, liter- 

 ary societies and associations such as this can exert a most health- 

 ful influence. The possibilities of this association for improving | 

 the mind of the youth of the country, and inspiring them with 

 ]>roper and laudable ambition, are great. It is unfortunate that in 

 the days gone by our forefathers took such little interest in j^re- 

 serving records of their times which, if preserved, would to-day 

 be of immense value to their descendants. No record of important 

 events of the past century, or at all events very incomi)lete re- 

 cords, have been kept. Even the facts in connection with the 

 great Miramichi Fire are but imperfectly known. In the Legisla- 

 tive Assembly and Provincial Departments at Fredericton, jniblic 

 documents of great value have been lost or destroyed, and almost 

 criminal neglect has been displayed on the part of those who 

 should have seen that they were properly taken care of and pre- 

 served. Some few years ago business called me to the cit.y of 

 Portland, Maine. While there I visited the early home of the 

 poet Longfellow, and spent a most interesting morning. Almost 

 everything connected with his life from childhood to manhood 

 had been ineserved. The little trundle bed on which he slept, 

 with the coverlet and bed clothes, was there. His school books, 

 on the first page of which was scrawled in boyish hand the 

 legend "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" ; the skates that he used ; 

 the desk at which he sat and wrote "The Rainy Day" ; the cor- 

 respondence W'ith his father when he made his first visit to 

 Europe ; the cost, bills and accounts of that trip ; the 

 old-fashioned uniform of his military ancestors ; the first piano 

 th>it came to the city of Portland, and other most interesting 

 relics, were all there. His sisters' dolls and their little beds — not 

 the fancy dolls of to-day with their wealth of hair, and eyes that 

 open and shut and who say papa and mamma, but the old-fashioned 



