At the Annual Dinner of the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest

The institution, he said, although at this time but a very young plant almost in the bud, had struck a deep root and taken a strong hold in the bosoms of tens of thousands of our fellow creatures. Little more than six months, according to the report just read, had passed since the hospital was open for the reception of patients, and within that short time no fewer than sixty or seventy patients had occupied its beds, while the number of out-patients – many whom they had been delighted to learn had, by the skill and timely aid they had received, been enabled to resume their accustomed occupations – amounted to no fewer than 750.

If this charity had not existed, the doors of no sick house within London’s wide bounds would have been open to these poor persons. Before the hospital was founded they would have suffered, lingered, pined, and died in their poor homes, without a hand stretched out to help them in their slow decay. Remembering that the classes of suffering which the charity purposed to alleviate were of all others peculiarly the growth and produce of the country; that they were often the inheritance of the youngest, fairest, best amongst us, that they deprived fair England of those whom it could least afford to lose, struck down the objects of our dearest hopes when in their youthful prime, and when it was hardest to lose them – remembering these things who could doubt that such a charity must be munificently endowed? He now called upon them to drink ‘Prosperity’ to the institution, not as an unmeaning toast, but as a pledge that nothing on their parts should be wanting to aid and urge it onward in its prosperous course.