" [Presidential Address to the American Club (Hobart) at the.Annual Dinner which honoured the Centenary of the Declaration of Independence, 1876.}
This is the fourth occasion upon which you have bestowed on me the honour of filling my present position at our annual reunion to celebrate the declaration of their independence by the United States of America, and in proposing to-night the toast that formally proclaims our sympathy with that event, I wish to give expression more particularly to the reasons which appear to me to justify so small a company as we are assembling year after year to commemorate it. We have met to-night in the name of the principles which were proclaimed by the founders of the Anglo-American Republic as those which justified resistance to a government which had violated them and a permanent repudiation of its authority ; and we do so because we believe those principles to be permanently applicable to the politics of the world and the practical application of them in the creation and modification of the institutions which constitute the organs of our social life to be our only safeguard against political retrogression. Unhappily, gentlemen, history teaches us that although perpetual progress is the law of humanity, retrogression in special cases is possible; and it is the possibility of political retrogression in consequence of the forgetfulness and violation of the principles we have met to magnify which justified us in assembling annually to remind one another of the worth of what we inherit from the struggles and victories of the forefathers of our kinsmen on the American continent. And the fewer we are, the more earnest and more punctilious we ought to be in keeping alive in each other's hearts the sentiments which bring us together at the present moment, so that we may be preserved against the insidious contamination of the indifference or lethargy of the majority around us. This, gentlemen, is the utility of our annual gathering on the anniversary of the day we commemorate to-night, and I have confined myself on this occasion to the vindication of our action in so doing in order to encourage the finest expression of sentiment in those of you who shall speak after me and trusting that the result which I have aimed at will be secured, I give you the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen North American British Colonies. "
Andrew Inglis Clark. Beaurepaire Hotel, Hobart, 1876 in John Reynolds,“A. I. Clark's American Sympathies and his Influence on Australian Federation”, The Australian Law Journal, Vol. 32 July ll, 1958. 62-3
