The other accommodation problem that required for our meetings you will remember I touched upon briefly in my report last year. The problem still exists but in a more intensified form, and there is no doubt in my own mind that Dr. Jones's oft-reiterated solution-premises of our own — is the ideal one.
But the cost of that is, at the present moment and in the near foreseeable future, far beyond our financial means.
But the recent proposal concerning a HONG KONG ARTS CENTRE may well be a practicable solution, and your Council has already taken steps to associate itself actively with this well worth-while proposal. In my view it will be one of the most important subjects on the agendas of Council meetings during the forthcoming year.
Community Problems. It is a very controversial point as to how well advised the executive committee of an organization such as ours would be in becoming actively or even theoretically involved in general matters of community interest.
There is one field however in which your Council felt no doubt about the direction in which its duty lay, and that was in the consideration of the problem of a CITY MUSEUM which was exercising the minds of many resident members of our community earlier last year.
The members of your Council present at the meeting when this subject was discussed, were unanimously of the opinion that we could and should discuss the subject in council. For this decision there were two main reasons.
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First, because the main purpose in founding our Society as long ago as 1847 was "to foster the preservation, and to encourage the study, of all matters concerning the history of this part of Asia; and second, and more specifically because in the inaugural address of our first President, Governor Sir John Davis, he urged the adoption by the young Society of two practical aims in addition to the lecture and discussion programmes usually adopted by learned societies. His suggested aims were the establishment in Hong Kong (a) of Botanic Gardens, and (b) of a City Museum."