148 Timehri. 



President Nunan's Address of Welcome. 



Your Excellency Sir Walter Egerton, Lady Egerton, My Lords, 

 Ladies and Gentlemen, — The principal object of our meeting here this 

 evening is to enable the members of this historic Society to receive Your 

 Excellency and Lady Egerton and to wish you both a hearty welcome to 

 the colon}'. 



The unprecedented manifestation of feeling which your arrival has 

 already called forth from the community will have convinced Your 

 Excellency that at the outset of your administration you have the good- 

 will, the sympathy and the support of everybody in British Guiana. 

 These are good auspices for your regime and we believe that you will 

 retain them undiminished to its close. They will have convinced you 

 that your efforts for the colony and for the Empire of which, to use the 

 words of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, it is an undeveloped estate, will not 

 be met in any quarter in any hypercritical or carping or niggard spirit. 

 The public opinion which is growing here into no negligible force will 

 take care of that. 



Whatever failings our people may have, ingratitude for services 

 rendered and lack of generosity for honest attempts to render service are 

 not to be included. Our people, on the other hand, are very shrewd and 

 rapid judges of character, and in the very short interval since your 

 arrival have decided that if this neglected imperial asset is not soon to 

 resume the march of progress the fault will not be in our stars but in 

 ourselves. Your Excellency has very rightly reminded anybody who may 

 wish to shift upon the shoulders of the administration the whole burden 

 of the primal curse attending the inheritance of Adam, that, 



" Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 



Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky 



Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull 

 Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull." 



But this colony expects to find in you an impartial and fearless 

 leader, to receive from your government a ringing watchword of progress, 

 and to secure with your aid the fullest consideration of all its legitimate 

 ambitions. 



In your stupendous task Your Excellency can always count upon 

 the active support of this Society. Just now it is renewing its mighty 

 youth and is making an effort to live up to the traditions of those times, 

 more fortunate in some if not in all respects than ours, of which the 

 memorials are borne in honour upon its walls. Its memories are going 

 fondly back to the days ot W. H. Campbell, Writer to the Signet, the 

 learned and patriotic Scotsman who founded it in 1844, to the days of 

 William Russell, who tapped the savannahs to supply the city and coast 

 and river-side by one of the most interesting hydraulic feats accomplished 

 outside of Egypt or Colorado. 



