THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
33 
the shadows of coming events press upon us heavily, and drive us 
forward. We have heavy responsibilities resting on us, and may 
we not take the opportunities of our coming together, for seeking 
counsel of each other in respect of those duties which are not the 
less serious because they are out of the ordinary course of every- 
day life 1 What shall we do for the future 1 
The most important question of all pressing for our consideration 
is that of education. It is daily increasing in importance. It has 
been taken up by the legislature, and pressed forward with much 
energy on behalf of the poorer classes of the population ; but the 
middle and upper classes, with but trifling exceptions, are still left 
in the slough of despond. To use the words of an eminent writer, 
recently given in the Nineteenth Century* describing " Society,"! 
he says, "What is the life history of these people? For the first 
few years of their existence they are boys and girls brought up 
pretty sensibly ; then the boys are sent to school, where they are 
largely occupied in pretending to obtain an infinitesimal acquaintance 
with two ancient languages, and that science which has the least 
to do with the ordinary duties of the citizen." I quote this passage 
because it confirms my own view of the value of ordinary middle- 
class education. 
If this be true, then certainly there cannot be a nobler or a better 
subject to be taken up by some one or more of our members in 
future sessions. 
This is not merely a schoolmaster's question, but one of most 
serious interest and importance to every head of a family. 
A sound mind in a sound body is certainly one of the chief, if 
not the greatest, desiderata in existence, and as we cannot have the 
one without the other, is it not our duty to seek to insure it, not 
for ourselves only, but also for all around us ; for those around us 
cannot long be suffering without our partaking more or less of such 
suffering ] 
Do not the recent returns of the last few months of the mortality 
of our district show the necessity of obtaining and diffusing better 
knowledge on the subject? And ought we to be content even with a 
mortality of fifteen per thousand, less than one-half of what it has 
been here lately, when the labours of our sanitarian reformers show 
us an infinitely superior normal rate amongst our criminal popula- 
* Nineteenth Century, May, 1878, page 810. 
f i. e. those in the ring of society. 
VOL. VII. C 
