STATE FOMOLOGICA.L SOCIETY. 35 



OI»ENING EXERCISES. 



At the appointed hour February 17, 1892, in Smith & Warren's 

 Hall, in Cornish, George F. Clifford, Esq., in behalf of the Ossipee 

 Valley Agricultural Sociely and the citizens of Cornish and vicinity 

 save the foilowins; 



ADDRESS OF WELCOME. 



In simple, honest words, such words as come unbidden to the 

 lips when out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh, and 

 in that word of all word else, that in such similitude pervades so 

 wide a range of distant differing tongues, in arctic chill and tropic 

 heat, on Greenland's icy mountains and India's coral strand, alike 

 the type and essence of a hearty greeting to a stranger guest, in 

 behalf of the people of this vicinit}- I bid you welcome among us. 



I believe that one of the great privileges attaching the human race 

 is intercommunity ; the leciprocal interchange of ideas and belief. 

 Man is a social being and to be a man he must be social. He who 

 is otherwise in taste and tendency is a perversion. 



8 'litude breeds selfishness. Selfishness breeds envy. P^nvy is 

 the parent of hate and at the feet of hate there sprout a multitude 

 of vices and of crimes. The purpose and the method of a man like 

 this are warped to suit the bent of his depraved mentality. Honor 

 and manhood sink beneath a swelling tide ot wrong, to cover which 

 hypocrisy outspread her tattered mantle and when that convict garb 

 is once assumed, the devil has foreclosed his mortgage and redemp- 

 tion has expired. How opposite the picture of the life of him who 

 carried out the purpose of his being and mingles as a man among 

 his fellows. 



An honest, manly pride becomes the mainspring of his being. 

 Before his eyes in constant panorama pass the work, the gi-aces and 

 accomplishments of his associates. Their example is his inspiration, 

 and to be like them is the goal of his ambition. At the feet of 

 wisdom, from the scholar's lips and in the teachings of experience 

 he learns the way and travels it to its grand end Somehow, some- 

 where in that life journey, by the operation of a law not mad*- with 

 hands, something is done, some particle is added to the great mosaic 

 of our social life without whidi it would be unfinished, incomplete 

 as far as wrought. 



