Remarks to Members of the Orthopaedic Association of the English-Speaking World.

THANK YOU very much. Needless to say, gentlemen, this is not any formal talk. It is my privilege, my honor, to greet you people here in the Nation's Capital and to felicitate you on the work you are doing in your professional capacity. But beyond such sentiments, I am concerned more with the residual good that comes out of a meeting such as yours--just because it is held, with all the English-speaking world here represented by men of education and of great and broad acquaintanceship, by reasons of their profession, among their own people.

It seems to me that this particular facet of a program that I call--and we call here in this country People-To-People--is a most important one and its results can be most fruitful.

I am convinced, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, that there is no enmity among people when those people get to know each other. The emotions, the uncontrolled prejudices and resentments that we sometimes encounter among people are normally because of the ignorance of those people as to the others--the people against whom they are resentful. The more we can spread the doctrine of people being guided by normal human aspirations, common objectives in life, common values that they treasure among themselves, by that much more we will advance the human race, not only in its joints and its bones but in its heart and its head and above all things in the way it can live in peace, and in opportunity of reaching--each individual and each race its full capacities.

Now, on a more personal side, I hear that most of you people were involved in World War Two, and as your chairman just pointed out, most of the men that were wounded in the chests and the abdomen, they did not get into the medical places as often as they should have; but those that got it in the legs and arms and hips and bones, why there were lots of them. So you people obviously were very, very busy. And so it gives me a very personal reason for thanking, through you, all of the orthopaedic surgeons of all the Allied forces of World War Two for the tremendous healing, the comfort, and the help you brought to those men. Because only in your memories lives that knowledge of how many of them came into those hospitals, to defend the values of which I have just spoken--the priceless values of freedom and human dignity and the kind of thing for which all of us of the English-speaking world live.

So, to you each, good wishes while you are here, the hope that your meeting will not only be instructive but very enjoyable; that you will find the weather and other surroundings of the National Capital here the kind that will be conducive to your great pleasure.

And to all of the people with whom you meet back in your own countries, my warm personal greetings, and the wish that we could all meet together on this occasion to say "How do you do" to each other.

Goodbye and good luck.