ADDRESS 
AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSION 1875-6. 
BY MR. J. SHELLY, 
President. 
Mr. Vice-President, Ladies, and Gentlemen, 
I suppose there is no enthusiasm more general and permanent 
than the enthusiasm for liberty. It has possessed, as with a kind 
of sacred passion, the finest and loftiest intellects of almost every 
age and country. Even religious enthusiasm has hardly been 
deeper, or burst forth with a more impetuous ardour. 
But, as Mr. Mill has mentioned at the beginning of his Essay, 
the idea of liberty, or at any rate the idea that has been uppermost, 
has varied very much at different times. For the proof of this, it 
is not necessary to turn, as he has done, to remote ages or distant 
countries. In our own country, and within the last half century, 
personal, political, social, and intellectual freedom have in turn 
become prominent objects of enthusiasm : personal freedom in the^ 
efforts which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our colonies ; 
political freedom in the agitation for reform ; social freedom in the 
immense, though comparatively quiet, revolution that has been 
going on during the last thirty or forty years; and intellectual 
freedom yet more recently and in a smaller circle, but one which 
is continually enlarging, and which includes already a large pro- 
portion of the leaders of all classes of society. 
The objects of popular enthusiasm are always much more 
ardently advocated than clearly defined. Nor is liberty an excep- 
tion to this rule. Words of this kind are employed as symbols of 
some good, which even at first, and when it is sought only by a 
few, is not so distinctly understood as it is eagerly desired, and they 
become more and more vague as they are appropriated for party 
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