All honour to these ladies, who, having learnt the elementary truth that privileges involve responsibilities, instead of hiding their talents in the napkin of selfishness, prefer to go forth as messengers of mercy, to try and flash the electric fire of philanthropy into the slumbering hearts of others, and to induce them to join in their grand and good work. They thus become a force and a factor of influence with all around them, and their reward will be the satisfaction of feeling that they are contributing their part in the great work of elevating these stricken members of our race, from their present unhappy and degraded condition to a higher position in the scale of created intelligence. * * * * * I trust I have said enough to show that the idiot ought and must be cared for; and in asking for your support, I will also ask you whether anything can be more gratifying than, as the result of scientific treatment, to see the idiot standing erect, asserting his birthright, and claiming brotherhood with the rest of the human family. True philanthropy never stops short of the remotest boundary of human want, and in urging upon you the claims of the Eastern Counties' Asylum for Idiots, I would have you remember that I am pleading for a class who cannot plead for themselves, and whose very silence is eloquent with an appeal for your merciful aid. Remember that these poor stricken individuals are members of the human family. They are heirs with us of all that human beings may hope for from the hands of a common Father. They possess the rudiments of all human attributes, especially the distinctive attribute of educability and of progressive improvement; their bodies are the vehicles which carry souls never destined to perish, through the series of ages, and when the walls of the cottages of clay in which their better part has sojourned collapse, and they mingle with their kindred dust, the freed inhabitants shall wing their way to brighter regions and to a more enduring home, and will thus illustrate the beautiful sentiment of one of our modern poets, when he said: "In death's unrobing room we strip from round us This garment of mortality and earth, And breaking from the embryo-state which bound us, Our day of dying is our day of birth."