Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/609

 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 595

him longer — was the late Henry Villard, who increased our membership, got out our Handbook of Immigration, and drew to these shores several hundred thousand, not to say millions, of those thriving citizens who now govern us in finance, industry, economics, history, and fiction— especially in the last named. I believe I succeeded him — nobody could replace him — and continued to sit in that seat of the scribes for some twenty years, usually holding also the secretaryship or chairmanship of my own special department — that of social economy, which a few of us, headed by Charles Brace and Mrs. Parkman, of Boston, instituted in 1873, and first showed what we could do at the New Year meeting of 1874. It was out of this department committee, that the Conference of Charities emerged, full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jove, and has been extending her sphere and covering myriads with her shield, now for five-and-thirty years. This work and much more — too numerous in kind even to mention — went on under illustrious presidents — Eliot, Curtis, Oilman, Benjamin Peirce, General Eaton, David Wells, Andrew White, Francis Wayland, Dr. Kingsbury (who still instructs Connecticut and the world in the Hartford Courant), and others whom I need not name. Dr. William T. Harris, who lately died at Providence, after Herculean labors for many years in the twin causes of education and philosophy, declined the office of president, but gave us much of his strenuous aid in other ways. Hardly a subject in our whole encyclo- pedic round that he was not able to discuss; and the same was true of most of our presidents — not excepting, possibly, the honorary president, whose office, like that of dukes, now so much out of favor, terminates only with life.

Amidst our toils and debates, at which no conclusion was ever reached, that I can remember, there were rare pleasures to be shared — the chief of which, as I now review the past, was to get round a dinner-table, or sit in a group at a Saratoga caravansary, and hear Frank Wayland, Captain Pat- terson, Eugen« Schuyler, and members of the New York Bar, tell stories of peace and war, of jurymen and alibis. All which was a chapter in social science.