The Inaugural Address. 



13 



English Kingdom, of which the old West Saxon Kingdom is now 

 itself a part. You will see that when George III. talked at his 

 accession about having been born and bred a Briton he was talking 

 nonsense, but that if he had said that born an Hanoverian German 

 he was closely allied by birth to the people whom he was called to 

 govern, he would have said something worth listening to. To 

 follow out the fortunes of this old Teutonic shire through the 

 successive phases of English history, to examine its customs, its 

 land tenures and buildings, to ascertain what men it produced, and 

 to follow out what contributions they individually made to the 

 successive struggles by which English liberty in Church and State 

 was won, and the three kingdoms were welded into a united whole, 

 . would be no useless or unworthy task. But time fails. For to-day 

 it is enough to have seen how our ancestors got here. Omne solum 

 for ti p atria f " the brave man is at home everywhere/' was the motto 

 which General Ludlow, the Wiltshire champion of the Parliamen- 

 * tary cause in the 17th century, inscribed over the door of the humble 

 mansion above the shores of the Lake of Geneva, where, the victim of 

 political ostracism, he had taken refuge in the evening of life from the 

 dagger of hireling assassins. The thoughtful care of a descendant 

 has piously removed the inscription from the house to find it a more 

 fitting place among the abodes of his own people ; but while 

 praising the deed, we at least do not require the inscription to 

 remind us that the descendants of the old Saxon settlers by the Wily 

 have ever been able to speak with their enemies in the gate, and 

 that Wiltshire would have no need to be ashamed of them or their 

 deeds at the bar of history, should anybody attempt to investigate 

 their claims to remembrance. Yes : men may 



remember well 

 This land of many hues ; 

 Whose charms what praise can tell, 

 Whose praise what heart refuse? 



The Rev. Canon Jackson, in moving a vote of thanks to the 

 noble President for his valuable address, said as one of the original 

 founders of the Society he remembered its first meeting at Devizes, 



