Remarks to the Members of the Directing Council of the Pan American Sanitary Organization.

IT IS a pleasure to have you come in, because I am, as Mr. Ewing says, very much interested in the public health and welfare of the whole world. And we are making some progress. We have improved the health conditions in nearly every place where we have been responsible for instance, in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. And we have tried to contribute to the improvement of the health of the Western Hemisphere, and I think we have made some successful progress in doing just that.

We have yet a long way to go, and when we have arrived at the condition which we all hope to arrive at, we must find a way, then, to ease the pressure of population.

For instance, in Puerto Rico the population has increased at an enormous rate since we have eliminated the diseases that held that population down. Now we have got to find a way to employ those people and see that they have a living. And that will be the same situation in all the countries of the Western Hemisphere, unless we work out a plan that will meet that very situation.

I was reading this morning in one of the releases--I think, Oscar, from your "shop"-that the number of people over 50 in the United States of America is nearly four times what it was in 1900.

We have got to meet that situation. We can do it, if we make up our minds that we want to do it.

I hope you will have a successful meeting here, and that you will consider all these questions and their end results, and then we can get somewhere in public health.

Thank you very much.