Addresses Given at Banquet

T HIS has been a most momentous year in the annals of the Institute. We have been in the midst of a situation which, were it not for the convulsions of social unrest with which life is surrounded on every side, would have attracted the attention of the world at large. I do not refer to the desperate campaign for new members. That has gone on much as usual except that, this being leap year, the annual proposal to the M. & M. Society has been omitted. Nor do I refer to the desperate situation which we found in other directions, the spread of Bolshevism, the burning of the Engineers' Club, the fact that the selling of copper appears to have become one of the lost arts. No, I speak of the great question which has to be. settled once and for all, as to whether this great Institute should adopt simplified spelling. The whole trouble started in the ranks of the California Hysterical Society. It appears, while most of the San Francisco members can read and write, several of them cannot spell. It also appears that the Secretary, in editing the Transactions, has perhaps made just a little bit too much of a point of employing the correct Stoughton idiom. At any rate, the rebels filed an amendment to the constitution, and the stage was set for civil war, with perhaps more stress on war than on civil.