My story must, however, begin with the 'sixties, when I commenced my business career. The growth of the city and its commerce has since been fully commensurate with the growth of the country. In the fifty years which have intervened the Empire has doubled its area and population, and the United Kingdom has trebled its trade. The population of Liverpool, including the newly added areas, has during the same period increased from 433,000 to 750,000, and the tonnage of our shipping from 4,977,272 tons to nearly 17,000,000 tons. She conducts one-third of the export trade and one-third of the import trade of the United Kingdom, and she owns one-third of the shipping of the kingdom, and one-seventh of that of the world. It has been a privilege to have been engaged in the commerce of the port during this remarkable expansion, and to have been associated with the conduct of public affairs during this period of growth and development in the city. Very much of this has been due to the enterprise and enlightenment of her own people. Liverpool shipowners have been in the vanguard of steamship enterprise, which has contributed so greatly to her prosperity; her merchants have built up her great trade in cotton and grain, and her citizens have not been slow to promote every sanitary improvement which made for the health and well-being of her people. During the past fifty years the town has been re-sewered, the streets paved with an impervious pavement, and a new water supply has been introduced. The city has been encircled by a series of public parks and recreation grounds, baths and washhouses have been established, free libraries have been opened in the various suburban centres of population, cellar dwellings have been abolished, and rookeries in the shape of courts and tenement houses have been done away with, and in their place clean and comfortable working-men's cottages and flats have been substituted. The curse of drink has been effectively checked by the closing of twenty-five per cent. of the public-houses. To quote from Professor Ramsay Muir's interesting _History of Liverpool_: "Thus, on all sides and in many further modes the city government has, during the last thirty years especially, undertaken a responsibility for the health and happiness of its citizens unlike anything that its whole previous history has shown, and if any full account were to be given of what the city as a whole now endeavours to do for its citizens much ought also to be said of the extraordinary active works of charity and religion which have been carried on during these years."