for reading our best books
and thinking our best thoughts. I have often grieved at the small
congregations in other churches no less than in my own, and the grief
was aggravated by the knowledge that those who were absent from church
were not necessarily otherwise well employed. I derived so much
pleasure from the excellent and cultured sermons of my friend the Rev.
John Reid during his term of office here that I regretted the fact that
others who might gain equally from them were not there to hear them. I
would like to see among the young people a finer conception of the
duties of citizenship, which, if not finding expression in church
attendance, may develop in some way that will be noble and useful to
society.

In the meantime the work of the Effective Voting League had been rather
at a standstill. Mrs. Young's illness had caused her resignation, and
until she again took up the work nothing further was done to help Mr.
Coombe in his Parliamentary agitation. In 1908, however, we began a
vigorous campaign, and towards the close of the year the propaganda
work was being carried into all parts of the State. Although I was then
83, I travelled to Petersburg to lecture to a good audience. On the
same night Mrs. Young addressed a fine gathering at Mount Gambier, and
from that time the work has gone on unceasingly. The last great effort
was made through the newspaper ballot of September, 1909, when a public
count of about 10,000 votes was completed with all explanations during
the evening. The difficulties that were supposed to stand in the way of
a general acceptance of effective voting have been entirely swept away.
Tasmania and South Africa have successfully demonstrated the
practicability, no less than the justice, of the system. Now we get to
the bedrock of the objections raised to its adoption, and we find that
they exist only in the minds of the politicians themselves; but the
people have faith in effective voting, and I believe the time to be
near when they will demand equitable representation in every
Legislature in the world. The movement has gone too far to be checked,
and the electoral unrest which is so common all over the world will
eventually find expression in the best of all electoral systems, which
I claim to be effective voting.

Among the many friends I had made in the other States there was none I
admired more for her public spiritedness than Miss Vida Goldstein. I
have been associated with her on many