in the first instance, in its original and simple
dress.

12 HINDE STREET, W.:
_August_ 18, 1876.

HYGEIA, A CITY OF HEALTH

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 befo