continued to applaud for several minutes. The hour of judgment had come for the Woodman, and all that the Woodman stood for. That night the town set up a new standard of dignity for its public men. I shall not try to follow the course of the movement. It began, as all such movements do, in the dream of solitary and silent hours. Then it made its way into the minds of a few men of kindred spirit. And the dream became an ideal and the ideal grew into a conviction; and conviction flamed into enthusiasm; and enthusiasm took shape in policy, and passed from the study and the club to the platform and the pulpit, and swept through the wards of the city, and fired men's minds and kindled their hearts, until the ideal that had once been a dream had become a reality. Those years in which the new gospel began to spread and to prevail— those glorious hours of crowded strife—can we ever forget them? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; But to be young was very heaven. Other men had their part in the work. Others did more to apply principles in practice. But Dawson came first. He led the way where others followed. And for myself, I hold in highest honour the man who is first to see when a great reform is needed, and first to point out how reformmay be effected. Others may flock round the standard he has raised; others may devise methods and details of policy; others may inscribe the new law in the statute-book; we are debtors to all of them. But we owe most to the man who first believed— and taught others to believe—that reform was possible. Such is the debt that this city owes to
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