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THE PEESIDENT'S ADDEESS. 



In selecting your President for the year, joii liave chosen one 

 whose only qnaliiication for that distinction is that he loves his 

 native county — with a certain narrow-minded affection, which 

 would make him quite happy if all the interests of his life were 

 limited by the banks of the Tamar and the shores of Cornwall ; 

 and that nothing which helps to bring to light the records of her 

 past history, to keep fresh the memories of her departed worthies, 

 to elucidate and register her physical characteristics and resources, 

 and above all to encourage the talents and energies and promote 

 the welfare of her people — nothing in short for which this Insti- 

 tution invites the co-operation of its members — can be indifferent 

 to him. A busy man, but a bad man of business, he often longs 

 — and longs in vain — for a little of that leisure for thought and 

 reading which others seem able to make for themselves, and with- 

 out which any attempt to place before you an address appropriate 

 to this occasion, and even in the most distant degree worthy of 

 those which have gone before — and which are stored in the pages 

 of your Journal — is altogether out of the question. Turning 

 back those pages beyond the two years, during which the chair 

 has been filLed by our esteemed diocesan, — and you have listened 

 to the wisdom and music of his words, — back to the year when 

 the unprecedented depression of Cornish industries drew from 

 his eloquent predecessor so sad a forecast of the years to come — 

 it is a source of gratitude and hopefulness to see that a change 

 for the better, which some of the wisest then deemed beyond 

 hope, has come. It woidd, indeed, be rash to prophesy for the 

 future. The life of a country, like that of an individual, must 

 be more or less a continued struggle with fluctuations, sometimes 



