Closing address

This has clearly been a splendid Conference, and I would say that of all the seven it has been the best yet. It has brought us up to date with a lot of thinking, not only of new ideas and concepts with which you have been presented and which have been debated and explored, but also it has illuminated some of the problems of the present which have to be dusted out, discussed and solutions worked out, if not here, at least against the background of all the things we have been talking about.

In these difficult times there has been some depression about; we have had depression and elation at this Conference. But there are immense prospects ahead. On the investment side of the business we have had advice from bankers and Wall Street and elsewhere, and making allowances for human frailties we do like sometimes to find ourselves exploring and explaining to the over-enthusiastic that not all our geese are swans (and some of them are even white elephants) although we try to eliminate as many of them as possible.