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may not get it if you all determine to try it at once, but if one out of every ten applications is
granted the other nine will not have to wait long. Those who get it will tell how good it is, and
if a little pressure is put on the Vestry they will respond to it and very soon make arrangements
to supply electric light and power to all who demand it. (Hear, hear.) This Vestry have boldly
undertaken to give during the day time till half-past three or four in the winter and till sunset
in the summer electrical energy at 3d. per Board of Trade unit, which brings the power within
the range of small users. Every worker in Shoreditch can economically use it at that price.
(Cheers.) A very important novelty is Druitt Halpin's heat storage system, in virtue of which
part of the steam raised will be used to meet the daily demand, and part laid up in store. That
store is a cylinder of water, ready to feed the steam engines when night comes on and a greater
supply is wanted. Thus the engines will get water into their boilers ready heated up to the full
temperature and pressure, and only the heat of evaporation will have to be supplied by the combustion
of the dust during the lighting hours. In this great work Shoreditch has been advised
by Kincaid, Waller and Manville, and it is largely to their knowledge and skill in taking the best
of what has been done elsewhere and adapting it to the special needs and the novel experiments
of this Vestry that this very great step has been made. What the Shoreditch Vestry has done
is well worthy indeed of the enterprise of the 60 years reign of Queen Victoria, of which we have
had so happy a commemoration during the past week. (Cheers.)
Prof. Stuart, M.P., who was cordially greeted, said the resolution he had the pleasure to
move was a vote of thanks to Lord Kelvin for all he had done that day. His presence was a
guarantee to the public and also to Shoreditch itself that this undertaking was a great reality, for
Lord Kelvin stood at the head of science, not only in England, but in the known world. (Cheers.)
They might take it for granted that every word his lordship said was well weighed—a nail
fastened in a sure place;—and what he had said to-day, both of the electric lighting undertaking
and of the enterprise of the borough of Shoreditch was well worthy of their attention and
must certainly make them feel very proud of the position he had described. In this year of
general rejoicing it well befitted such a great and popular borough that it should celebrate the
occasion by the opening of an undertaking due to their common municipal enterprise. The
enterprise of Shoreditch had been characterised by Lord Kelvin in words better than he could
use, but he would remind both his lordship and the assembled company that the population
which had undertaken this great thing, which so eminent a man was able to characterise so
well, was a population of working men and working women. It was a population of small
shopkeepers and of persons, except in a few instances, who were not of great wealth, and he
thought it was to their honour and credit above all things, that they had been, as Lord Kelvin
described, the premier body to lead the way in such a work. It was public enterprise directed
to that which public enterprise could best and most effectively be directed to, for there was no
place in which public enterprise, personal enterprise and vigour of personal undertaking were
more to be found than in this borough. They knew, as the people of all times in this great
nation, what it was fitting to deal with both in public enterprise and private enterprise. Both
were hand in hand in that great borough, and it was for the credit of the borough, of the
metropolis and of England that they were found together. (Cheers.) That was not a time to
be occupied with a laudation of themselves, but he could not help calling their attention to what
surrounded them. They had on that site a public library, the electric lighting station, and the
dust destructor, the superfluous heat of which was to be used for the baths and washhouses;
and over the way they were going to have, arising from a municipal undertaking, the best and
the largest, and the most efficient technical institution in London—(cheers)—an institution
separated from that place by a beautiful garden and open space, the whole forming a credit to
the borough and a something for other places to imitate. He could not forbear letting Lord
Kelvin know that they had in Shoreditch a technical school adapted to cabinet-making and
other trades, prized alike by masters and workmen, and utilized by them because it made them
more efficient in the trades. They had here then in short a centre of great public enterprise of
which they might worthily be proud, worthy of the sixtieth year of the reign of their Queen, and