Statement on the Report of the-President's Research Committee on Social Trends.

THE PRESIDENT said:

"In commenting upon the publication of the Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, I deem it worthwhile to expand somewhat the prefatory note which I prepared some months ago for publication with it. That foreword is as follows:

"'In the autumn of 1929 I asked a group of eminent scientists to examine into the feasibility of a national survey of social trends in the United States, and in December of that year I named the present Committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell to undertake the researches and make a report. The survey is entirely the work of the Committee and its experts, as it was my desire to have a complete, impartial examination of the facts. The Committee's own report, which is the first section of the published work and is signed by members, reflects their collective judgment of the material and sets forth matters of opinion as well as of strict scientific determination.

"'Since the task assigned to the Committee was to inquire into changing trends, the result is emphasis on elements of instability rather than stability in our social structure.

"'This study is the latest and most comprehensive of a series, some of them governmental and others privately sponsored, beginning in 1921 with the report on "Waste in Industry" under my chairmanship. It should serve to help all of us to see where social stresses are occurring and where major efforts should be undertaken to deal with them constructively.'

"I wish to add to the foregoing the observation that the significance of this report lies primarily first, in the fact that it is a cooperative effort on a very broad scale to project into the field of social thought the scientific mood and the scientific method as correctives to undiscriminating emotional approach and to insecure factual basis in seeking for constructive remedies of great social problems. The second significance of the undertaking is that, so far as I can learn, it is the first attempt ever made to study simultaneously all of the fundamental social facts which underlie all our social problems. Much ineffective thinking and many impracticable proposals of remedy have in the past been due to unfamiliarity with facts in fields related to that in which a given problem lies. The effort here has been to relate all the facts and present them under a common standard of measurement.

"I regard these aspects of the report as of far greater significance and value than any of its details, admirable though these studies are."