We meet in this Assembly, a voluntary Parliament of men and women,
to study together and to exchange knowledge and thought on works
of every-day life and usefulness. Our object, to make the present
existence better and happier; to inquire, in this particular section
of our Congress:--What are the conditions which lead to the pain and
penalty of disease; what the means for the removal of those conditions
when they are discovered? What are the most ready and convincing
methods of making known to the uninformed the facts: that many of the
conditions are under our control; that neither mental serenity nor
mental development can exist with an unhealthy animal organisation;
that poverty is the shadow of disease, and wealth the shadow of
health?
These objects relate to ourselves, to our own reliefs from suffering,
to our own happiness, to our own riches. We have, I trust and believe,
yet another object, one that relates not to ourselves, but to those
who have yet to be; those to whom we may become known, but whom we can
never know, who are the ourselves, unseen to ourselves, continuing our
mission.
We are privileged more than any who have as yet lived on this planet
in being able to foresee, and in some measure estimate, the results of
our wealth of labour as it may be possibly extended over and through
the unborn. A few scholars of the past, like him who, writing to the
close of his mortal day, sang himself to his immortal rest with the
'_Gloria in excelsis_,' a few scholars might foresee, even as that
Baeda did, that their living actual work was but the beginning of
their triumphant course through the ages,--the momentum. But the
masses of the nations, crude and selfish, have had no such prescience,
no such intent. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!' That has
been the pass, if not the password, with them and theirs.
We, scholars of modern thought, have the broader, and therefore more
solemn and obligatory knowledge, that however many to-morrows may
come, and whatever fate they may bring, we never die; that, strictly
speaking, no one yet who has lived has ever died; that for good or
for evil our every change from potentiality into motion is carried on
beyond our own apparent transitoriness; that we are the waves of the
ocean of life, communicating motion to the expanse before us, and
leaving the history we have made on the shore behind.
Thus we are led to feel this greater object: that to whatever extent
we, by our exertions, confer benefits on those who live, we extend the
advantage to those who have to live; that one good thought leading to
practical useful action from one man or woman, may go to the virtue
of thousands of generations; that one breath of health wafted by our
breath may, in the aggregate of life saved by it, represent in its
ultimate effect all the life that now is or has been.
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.