s to be congratulated on its present satisfactory status.
The reports show a very satisfactory financial condition, and you may
note a continuing increase in membership that is extremely gratifying.
This, after having nearly doubled in the last seven years, still shows
no sign of diminishing in its rate of increase. It may be said, also,
that we have in the Society an excellent publishing house, where the
members have an opportunity to secure technical papers published in the
highest style of the art. We have in general in the officers, a number
of men, who, within the prescribed limits, labor for the benefit of the
members, but we also have constitutional limitations to the activity of
our governing body, so that the voice of the Society is never heard, or,
at least, might be compared to that still, small voice we call
"conscience," which is not audible outside of the body that possesses
it.

Now, in these days, when the statement that two and two make four is
accepted from its latest originator as a newly discovered truth, a
little extension of our mathematics, to take into our estimate people as
well as things, is what we principally need, and it would be a good
thing, regarded either from the point of view of what the world needs or
the more selfish view of our own particular gains. At the present time
it would seem as though our world had thrown away the old gods without
taking hold of any new ones. Private ownership as it formerly existed is
no longer recognized; individual action in almost any large field is
to-day hampered and curtailed in a manner undreamed of twenty years ago.
In fact, our whole scheme of government seems to be passing from the
representative form on which it was founded, to some new form as yet
undetermined. Whether all this is, in our opinion, for good or for evil,
is of no particular concern. The matter that concerns us is, that we
have left our old moorings, and that, to secure new ones, new limits are
to be set to the activities of men along lines which concern us, and
that, therefore, it is necessary that those who by education and
training are best fitted to consider facts and not desires, should guide
society as much as possible along its new lines. I consider that we as a
profession are particularly trained to do this by our consideration of
facts as they exist, and I think it will be recognized by all that we
are not in our work or activities bound by any precedent, even if we do
lea