PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 1915. 15 



is of real and immediate importance to-day. Yet the work has scarcely 

 been begun. There is, for example, as yet no adequate record of the part 

 England played in the great reconstruction of Europe after the Napole- 

 onic Wars. Neither Canning nor Palmerston is known to us, except by 

 loose and inadequate records." 



After our day the history of the momentous times in which we live 

 will be written. We must be content with the fragments of history in 

 the making which fall to us in the meantime, and from day to day carry 

 our hopes and disappointments as they come with such fortitude as 

 we may. 



"None of us are prepared to suppose anything so unscientific as that 

 the Allies are decadent and the Germans superhuman, or that all goes 

 well with them yonder while all goes ill with the Allies. Let us try to 

 conceive that a war is a slow and hazardous shifting of unequal values. 

 Let us recognize that, as this war is vaster in itself than all the cam- 

 paigns and battles of two centuries put together, a decisive transfor- 

 mation of values must not be looked for suddenly. We cannot expect 

 to achieve in teens of months success such as our forefathers could only 

 gain in teens of years. Reflecting that in the case of the British people 

 never were the parties, the Kingdom and the Empire united as now, 

 and that never before had we forces so great and gallant, or Allies so 

 determined and powerful. Let us not look on the dark side, which is 

 that never before had we so powerful an enemy. Let us be calm in the 

 confidence of ultimate success, as British patriots put up with post- 

 ponement patiently, with the certain conviction that the longer the war 

 goes on the worse and more lasting will the ruin of Germany be, and the 

 wider the influence of Great Britain in the vast changed future now to 

 come." 



FRANK ARNOLDI, 



President. 



