38 OPENING SESSION 



have come here may I say how much we thank you for 

 your services in the past seven years ? I would urge you 

 not to be too sectional in your outlook, and above all, I 

 would advise you not to be too bureaucratic in your 

 organization. We want to temper the skill of the doctors 

 with the human kindly common sense of the layman; and 

 where the humanities of the average man and woman are 

 apt to run riot, as sometimes happens with sentimentalists, 

 we want the cold scientific hand to restrain them when 

 they are going too far. I can only say that this Conference 

 and I have the right to say it that this Conference owes 

 as much to the medical officers of health, to the midwives, 

 to the matrons, to the nurses, to the schoolmasters and 

 mistresses and the various municipalities of the United 

 Kingdom, as the working classes owe to you for all your 

 beneficent labours. I can assure you that my Right 

 Honourable friend the President of the Board of Educa- 

 tion, myself, and the Prime Minister, who at this moment 

 is opening a Conference on Tuberculosis I can assure you 

 that we hold the view strongly, and we intend to act on it, 

 that the health of the people is the supreme law, and that 

 however much we may grow in trade, in commerce, and in 

 wealth, however much our armies and our navies may in- 

 crease, however much our material supremacy in the world 

 may grow all these things are as nothing unless we have 

 clean and happy houses that shall be homes, unless we have 

 homes in which mothers can live decent lives during their 

 hour of trial and difficulty, and unless we have both town 

 and countryside peopled with strong men and women able 

 to endure much hardship, doing useful work for wages to 

 which they are worthily entitled. It is only in this way we 

 can make the English people what they ought to be the 

 strongest, the healthiest, the bravest, and the most enduring 

 of the peoples of the world. (Cheers.) 



Sir THOMAS BARLOW, Bart., K.C.V.O. (President of the 

 Royal College of Physicians), then took the chair, which 

 had been vacated by the President of the Local Government 

 Board. 



Assistant Surgeon-General J. W. KERR (of the United 

 States Public Health Service) said : Mr. Chairman, ladies 

 and gentlemen, on behalf of the American Government and 

 the National Association for the Study and Prevention of 

 Tuberculosis in America, it is my privilege to extend greet- 

 ings to the members and delegates of this English-speaking 

 Conference. The assembling of such a Conference is a 

 cause for congratulation. It is an indication of a desire 

 for the extension of the safeguarding of human life and the 



