This was an impressive Conference because of the make-up, and it was a mighty well conducted Conference: the chairman, Secretary of Commerce Hoover, kept it in hand from the start—and this in spite of the fact that there were all the elements of conflict found in the Industrial Conference and some extra, for here we had rivalry between the labor groups themselves, particularly that thorny problem of trade jurisdiction. But Mr. Hoover was enormously skillful, and we came out with a program which, if it had been carried out with the machinery which the Conference devised, would have brought the country to 1929 in a very different state of preparedness. After our dismissal I put together in a lecture what I conceived to be the practical conclusion of the Conference. As my text I used one of the first principles laid down, “The time to act is before a crisis becomes inevitable.” This text was an official and authoritative recognition of the unpalatable fact that business always moves in cycles—that a boom will be followed by a slump, that common sense demands preparedness. How prepare? The Federal Government, state, county, community down to the smallest, was to have in reserve plans and money for work it wanted done that was not absolutely essential at the moment. When a slump started, this reserve was to be called out. Private industry was by no means let off. In good times it was to lay up a surplus with which to keep plants and laboratory alive and ready for action as soon as there was a return of orders. The employee was to be protected by employment insurance. The individual householder was to keep back certain needed repairs and improvements for the day of need. That is, everybody was to be ready with his life preserver. For two years I talked with the conviction of one who has a scheme he believes sound, and I was listened to with more or less enthusiasm, until it was obvious the slump was passing. It was a bad dream well over—good times had come. Why lay plans for the future? By 1926 there were no longer audiences to listen to a talk on preparing for unemployment. Apparently everybody, even President Hoover, who had been the all-efficient chairman of the Conference, forgot all about the program. On the whole my little excursions into public service were discouraging and disillusioning; but they did convince me that I was right when I gave as one of my reasons for not going on to President Wilson’s Tariff Commission the fact that I was not fitted for the kind of work a commission or conference requires.