Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/318

 306 The Library. should be withdrawn. If our Council will draft a measure calculated to effect these objects, I may very safely promise it the support of our President, and of every scholar and thinker who is sensible of the preciousness of the historical record and of the mischief of allowing it to be tampered with to gratify the sensitiveness of individuals. And now, though I have disclaimed any retrospective pur- pose in this address, I cannot but, in conclusion, remark upon the combination of agreeable recollections which our meeting in this city inevitably brings before us. We have met in the metro- polis of Ireland ; we now meet in her second city. We have met in Manchester and in Liverpool ; we now meet in a city uniting the manufacturing greatness of the one with the marine pre-eminence of the other. We have met in the venerable colleges of Oxford and Cambridge ; we now meet in a seat of learning of the modern time, equipped with every instrument of culture, conspicuous among which is to be reckoned a noble library, owing its existence to the civilising and conciliatory thought of a great statesman an English graft on an Irish stem, in whose flourishing condition, hospitable as it is to every sect and every party, we may discern the emblem and the earnest of the perfect fusion of the people of these islands in language, now nearly accomplished in blood, becoming more intimate day by day in interests, which the course of events is irresistibly work- ing out in literature, which, in our humble way, we are met here to promote.