THE president's ADDRESS. 47 



heard, for saints now were not called on, as the ancients were, 

 to curse their enemies. This was the age of mechanical know- 

 ledge, the age in which, for the first time in the history of 

 humanity, man had powers of nature in his hand, so that almost 

 daily some new power was given to man and turned to his 

 service. To-day it was wireless telegraphy ; what it would be 

 to-morrow it was almost impossible to say. This was the result 

 of education and the training of thought. Anyone who wandered 

 through the streets of great cities would see scarcely a child who 

 looked starved, and so, while man was getting more education, 

 the very poorest were not being crushed down. In the ancient 

 days the serf was ground still lower to enable men to carry 

 on their work. It might in those days have been necessary, for 

 the only slave was the living slave, but now they had the dead 

 slave of a mechanical power. They now ground this slave and 

 relieved men from the toil. There was also in these days a vast 

 difference in the position of women, compared with the times 

 spoken of by the president, for she was no longer the slave, but 

 the equal and the friend of man (applause). 



The President, acknowledging the vote, said they must 

 remember, in regard to the lives of the saints in Celtic countries, 

 that the histories of them had been for the most part re- written 

 in the middle ages, and the monastic writers (of the 11 th and 12th 

 centuries) saw through their own spectacles and could not under- 

 stand the condition, of half-savagery and half -Christianity, in 

 which the first founders existed. In the days of those writers 

 there was a great craving for the miraculous, and they heaped 

 in the marvellous to a wonderful extent. It was easy to strip 

 that off and generally to find a clear, definite substratum of 

 history. They could check one writing with another to see if 

 there were any great anachronisms, and if there were not, it 

 was clear that the main outline was correct, 



