Housing in town and country : being a report of a conference of the Garden City Association, held in the Grand Hall, Criterion Restaurant, London, on March 16th, 1906 / papers and addresses by the Right Hon. Lord Carrington, Lord Justice Fletcher-Moulton ... and others ; with an introduction by Thomas Adams.

Garden City Association (London, England)

Date:: [1906]

Credit: Housing in town and country : being a report of a conference of the Garden City Association, held in the Grand Hall, Criterion Restaurant, London, on March 16th, 1906 / papers and addresses by the Right Hon. Lord Carrington, Lord Justice Fletcher-Moulton ... and others ; with an introduction by Thomas Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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[APPENDIX I.] REPORT OF DINNER. The evening previous to the conference Mr. Justice Neville, Chairman of the Association, was entertained to dinner by members and friends of the Garden City Association, over whom Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton presided. A long list of apologies having been read, to Mr. Justice Neville, The Chairman said : We have now come to the serious part of the business of the evening, which has been entrusted to my hands. Your Secretary, with laudable perseverance, has been urging me to commence my speech by a doleful recital of a long string of apologies. Those apologies, I admit, do great honour to the guest whose health I am about to propose, because they show that although the busy time from both the Parliamen- tary and social point of view has prevented this long list of guests who would have done him honour from coming here, yet it is a list which would give no special pleasure to anybody but myself. When I glance down the list of names I feel I am a lucky man, because all or any of them would have deprived me of the pleasure I shall have of proposing the health of your chairman and my friend, Mr. Ralph Neville (applause). I assure you, accustomed as I am to public speaking, and loathing it with an in- tensity proportionate to the use I have been obliged to make of it, nothing can prevent my task to-night giving me genuine enjoyment (applause). I know vast numbers of scientific men, and I am taken into the corners of the laboratories and shown prize microbes. They are engaged in what they call, in bated voice, scientific research. And I thank them for it. But I am bound to say that there is no scientific research which appeals to me as closely as the practical research in which this society is engaged. I put the two together because alike they depend not on the chemistry of dead things but on the biology of living organisms. Anything can be made to exist by a sufficiently lavish expenditure of money and the judicious selection of patrons, but the object of this society is not to keep in existence something that is dead or only lives by a struggle an exotic existence. It is to introduce a new plant which is to take root, grow, and multiply, and become a permanent in- habitant of our realm ; which is going to be in the future a recognised source of health in the community which commercial and national success are accumulating in enormous numbers, by dealing with the science of live things. Respecting your efforts in that way I ask myself, what are those con- ditions of success ? Well, I think the first condition of success is that you should have a wise leader. I think there are some people who think that legislation can do everything. I believe it was reported that Mr. Gladstone in his heart believed that the House of Commons could do everything but make a man into a woman, or Dice versa, and I believe he acted conscientiously up to that belief to the end of his life. But we know better than that, and we know that in order to succeed you must go in absolute accordance with those conditions of life which surround you, and therefore wise guidance is the first essential of success. And to pilot a ship in such unexplored waters is no slight matter. You must be not only a business man, but you must

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