Sept.
General Smuts, as the spiritual father of the League of Nations, as a philosopher and a botanist in his leisure moments, brings to the hundredth presi-it ship of the British Association a versatility which specially. appropriate at this hour. Six years ago he was President of the South African 'Association for the Advancement of Science, so his premotion to the head of the parent body has been well-earned. He was able, in his presidential address, to' bring the mind of the practical statesman and lawyer] to bear on the philosophical issues of the moment. He looked back to the year of Faraday and, in so doing, he really looked forward, He was able to remind the present generation that the woes of yesterday afforded a guide to the woes of to-day and, thus, the possible recovery of to-morrow could be contemplated. Let a passage be quoted from the Annual Register of 1820:
"The ordinary rate of expense in every portion of the communityhiad increased much beyond what the same classes would formerly have demanded and conceived it necessary and right, to indulge in."
In_ that period, following a European, War on a then unprecedented scale, there' were discussions of the urgent need of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.