4 THE RT. HON. S. CAVES PKESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



admit that there is justification for their boldest plans. I 

 once heard the late Lord Derby say that he was on the 

 committee which threw out the first railway bill, on the 

 ground that a speed of more than twelve miles an hour 

 would be dangerous to human life. Lord Derby was still a 

 young man when Brunei travelled from Bristol to London, 

 one hundred and twenty miles, considerably within two 

 hours ! We have put a girdle of telegraphic wire round the 

 world. A toast has been given from London to Calcutta, and 

 the reply received, within the space of an ordinary banquet. 

 Going westward, our statesmen's speeches are read in New 

 York apparently before they are delivered in London. We 

 build our war ships of enormous masses of iron, and arm theiu 

 with jiuus, each one more formidable than a broadside of the 

 last generation. Vessels have been invented which, like fish, 

 cans wim either upon or below the surface. Bridges, no longer 

 supported on arches or by chains, are level iron roads, striding 

 across broad rivers and arms of the sea. Eailway trains climb 

 a mountain seven thousand feet high, while others run seven 

 miles through its centre ; and we are threatened this summer 

 with a friendly invasion from America by balloon. The pre- 

 dictions of Darwin in the Botanic Garden were deemed in 

 his day as extravagant as his grandson's theories are by most 

 people now. But time has justified them. Writing many 

 years before steam vessels, railways, or torpedo ships, he says : 



" Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar 

 Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car ; 

 Or, on wide waving wings expanded, bear 

 The flying chariots through the fields of air. — 

 Taught by the sage, lo ! Britain's sons shall guide 

 Hugh sea-balloons beneath the tossing tide." 



These are great achievements ; but machinery is like the 

 trunk of an elephant, which can not only iiproot a tree, but 

 pick up a pin. The art of saving labour by mechanical con- 

 trivances is yet in its infancy. It will be a vast addition to 

 human happiness, a great blessing to employers and employed, 

 when the labour which is only worth starving wages shall be 

 everywhere performed by machinery. 



Architecture forms a connecting link between the mechani- 

 cal and the tine arts. Some waiT has suajoested that we shall 

 have no success in architecture till we have hanged an archi- 

 tect ; and, indeed, we ha\e little to boast of in these degenerate 

 days. Our churches built during the last twenty-five years 

 are doubtless superior to those of the preceding century, but 

 •simply because we have reverted to earlier models. In London, 



