At the close of a Parliamentary session, an uneventful leader of a section of Parliament banters his more eventful rival, and enlivening his criticism by a sneer at our Congress, challenges the contempt of his rival, as if to draw it forth in the same critical direction.  Alas! it is too true that great congresses, like great men, and even like Parliaments, do live sometimes for many years and talk much, and seem to miss much and advance little; so that in what relates to the mere present it were wrong, possibly, to challenge the sally of the statesman who, from his own helpless height, looked down on our weakness.  But inasmuch as no man knoweth the end of the spoken word, as that which is spoken to-day, earnestly and simply, may not reappear for years, and may then appear with force and quality of hidden virtue, there is reason for our uniting together beyond the proof of necessity which is given in the fact of our existence.  Perchance some day our natural learning, gathered in our varied walks of life, and submitted in open council, may survive even Parliamentary strife; perchance our resolutions, though no sign-manual immediately grace them, are the informal bills which ministers and oppositions shall one day discuss, Parliaments pass, royal hands sign, and the fixed administrators of the will of the nation duly administer.

These thoughts on the future, rather than on the passing influence of our congressional work, have led me to the simple design of the address which, as President of this Section, I venture to submit to you to-day.  It is my object to put forward a theoretical outline of a community so circumstanced and so maintained by the exercise of its own freewill, guided by scientific knowledge, that in it the perfection of sanitary results will be approached, if not actually realised, in the co-existence of the lowest possible general mortality with the highest possible individual longevity.  I shall try to show a working community in which death,—­if I may apply so common and expressive a phrase on so solemn a subject,—­is kept as nearly as possible in its proper or natural place in the scheme of life.

HEALTH AND CIVILISATION.

Before I proceed to this task, it is right I should ask of the past what hope there is of any such advancement of human progress.  For, as my Lord of Verulam quaintly teaches, ’the past ever deserves that men should stand upon it for awhile to see which way they should go, but when they have made up their minds they should hesitate no longer, but proceed with cheerfulness,’ For a moment, then, we will stand on the past.