THANK YOU very much, Doctor. It is a very great pleasure and privilege to meet you this afternoon.
I am highly interested in what you are doing. I am highly interested in the exchange of ideas which take place and how little difference they find there is between them.
It has taken us a long time to discover that agriculture is the fundamental basis on which we all live. We must have things to eat and things to wear and they must come from but one place and that is the land.
It took us a long time to discover that farm credit and farm management are the two most important things of the foundation of a republic. I think we have made some progress in this country in the past hundred years. We don't say we made all the progress.
Ideas come from all around the world. The world is full of ideas, it is whirling with ideas and it is a good thing. The very fact that you are here shows that in the long run we will have a friendly world and I hope our young people, and we have some in the same sort of errands that you have here, will come back with information for us that will give us a chance to progress and do better than we are now.
I thank you all for coming. I hope during the year you will become imbued with such close friendships to us that we can never have a failing out.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke in the Rose Garden at the White House at 3:30 p.m. In his opening words he referred to Dr. Henry G. Bennett, Administrator of the Technical Cooperation Administration, Department of State.
The World Land Tenure Conference was sponsored jointly by the University of Wisconsin, the Technical Cooperation Administration, and the Economic Cooperation Administration. The Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Organization of the United Nations assisted in its operation.
The conference opened on October 8, 1951, at the University of Wisconsin and lasted 6 weeks, after which the members made a brief tour, ending in Washington on November 16. There were 51 delegates and 20 trainees from 38 countries in attendance at the conference.
Harry S Truman, Remarks to Delegates and Trainees From the World Land Tenure Conference. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/231291
