STATEMENT BY MR. W. M. RITTER AT CONVENTION, 

 LOUISVILLE, JUNE 15th and 16th. 



Mr. Ritter: I would like to ask you to postpone any 

 talk from me. I can only repeat what these gentlemen have 

 been saying and simply weary you with listening to my rep- 

 etition. 



Chairman Sherrill : I do not think we can respect your 

 wishes, we want to hear from you. 



Mr. Ritter: I will say that the Chair is an autocrat. I 

 do not know that I can add anything to what has already 

 been said. It is rather embarrassing to me to try to say 

 something that would be interesting after the field has been 

 covered so ably by others. ******** I think we should all 

 become aroused to the importance of this situation. We have 

 a problem here. Must I say the same thing I said this morn- 

 ing? 



The Chair: Go to it. 



Mr. Ritter: Our problems are something like this. We 

 have been struggling along for twenty or twenty-five years. 

 We have had good years and we have had bad years, and 

 we have been trying to do our business on certain policies 

 and plans which we believe to be proper, and we have found 

 things existing from time to time that did not please us. 

 We fought it out single handed for a time and then tried 

 to get a lot of people to come in and help fight against these 

 evil practices. 



I agree with our good friend, Dr. Compton, that we 

 want to avoid the criticism of the public, which might bring 

 about Governmental control. This criticism is made because 

 we have been sleeping at the switch and not working to 

 see that our business was conducted properly. Too many of 

 us have been willing when we sold a car of lumber that the 

 other fellow could do as he pleases with it, and the result 

 was that the man who made the lumber got the punish- 

 ment. 



I think we have all felt that these evils should be cor- 

 rected, but we have been too prone to let "George" do it. 



