PLANS FOR ITS CELEBRATION.

We are now within four months of the end of our first century. The Institution was founded on 4th March, 1824, at a " Public Meeting of Noblemen, Gentlemen, Merchants, and others held at the City of London Tavern." The Archbishop of Canterbury was in the Chair, and altogether twenty resolutions were passed, formally constituting the Institution, and laying down the broad principles on which it should carry out, as a voluntary society, its task of " Preserving life in cases of shipwreck on the coasts of the United Kingdom." Those broad principles have, through a century marked by great developments, and by many vicissitudes, remained unchanged. The Institution, though it has developed in many ways of which its founders could never have dreamed, is fundamentally the Institution which they designed that it should be.

Next year, when we celebrate this great event in our national history, the hundredth birthday of our Life-boat Service the first Life-boat Service to be established in any country we shall be able to point to the proud fact that at every danger point round our 5,000 miles of coast a Life-boat Station is now established, fully equipped, vigilant, ready for every call. We shall be able to point also to the magnificent record of a hundred years nearly 60,000 lives saved from shipwreck.

It is an anniversary which we feel that our thousands of willing workers, and the tens of thousands of contributors to our funds, will be proud to celebrate ; and the Institution is making arrangements for its worthy celebration in all parts of the country.

In London the celebrations will begin formally with the Annual Meeting.

Like that original and historic meeting in 1824, it will be held in the City of London on 4th March, and we hope that the descendants of many of those who took part in the first meeting will be present.

In June there will be a Life-boat Ball, and this will be followed, at the beginning of July, by a Life-boat Dinner, at which our President, the Prince of Wales, will preside, and to which those holding the Gold Medal of the Institution and representatives of all foreign Life-boat societies will be invited.

This dinner will be preceded by a technical conference, at which there will be an opportunity of exchanging ideas and experiences with the other Life-boat societies, and the opportunity will be taken of discussing with them the very important subject of making uniform for all countries the signals to be used by vessels in distress and by Life- boats.

It is hoped also to have in London a Thanksgiving Service, a Life-boat concert, and Life-boat matinee, both at a theatre and at a music hall. One of the new Motor Life-boats now under construction will spend the summer on the Thames and, it is hoped, visit all the regattas.

By a fortunate chance our centenary coincides with the British Empire Exhibition. The Institution has arranged to erect its own building, and will exhibit there a Motor Life-boat and models and pictures showing the development of the Service. It will also have a Pulling and Sailing Life-boat moored on one of the lakes in the Exhibition grounds.

Outside London anniversary meetings will be arranged in all the large towns; and in the coastal counties, in addition to the meeting, there will be a procession, with a Life-boat, and a Crew from the nearest station.

During the autumn special meetings have been held in London and other parts of the country in order to make plans for next year, to arrange the Anniversary Meeting, and to discuss such other forms of celebration thanksgiving services in the churches, concerts, theatrical performances as seem desirable.

Our aim, in short, is to invite all those who work, in whatever way, for the Life-boat cause to join with the Institution in celebrating this great event, and at the same time to bring home to the many who do not the meaning and the national value of the Life-boat Service. By the exhibition in London, by the regattas, by the anniversary meetings and the visits of Life-boats and Crews to inland towns, we hope that thousands of our people at home and thousands of visitors from overseas will, before the year is out, have replaced a vague knowledge that there is a British Life-boat Service by something much more definite and enduring, and that we shall not only have fitly celebrated the century that is passed, but have embarked on the second century with the personal interest and support of many more thousands of British people in Great Britain and the Dominions than we have ever had before.