Health > European conference on rural hygiene (June 29th-July 7th, 1931)

one another and to find, in the common fund of collective experience you are about to
create, the strength needed to speed up progress in your own countries. That will be a
very valuable international achievement.
I referred a moment ago to the unity of European life which is at the basis of our
Conference ; but this unity is not perfect, it contains serious inequalities. The conditions
of rural life have not progressed to the same degree everywhere ; some countries are a
hundred years behind, and the level of economic life is by no means uniform.
Nothing, perhaps, can better adjust the inequalities in European rural conditions
than the profound changes which you will introduce into everyday life — better ventilation,
better lighting, greater comfort and better health, larger requirements, and thence more
extensive economic relations, narrower margins between poverty and wealth among
peasant populations ; such, gentlemen, may be the result of your deliberations and recom¬
mendations. I am confident that your work will be an effective contribution to enhancing
European stability, and that you will identify yourselves closely with the League’s efforts
to consolidate peace.
The President’s Opening Speech.
The President spoke as follows :
May I express the unanimous feeling of all the delegates and members of the Confe¬
rence and thank you for the noble sentiments that you have just voiced in the name of
the great institution which has convened our Conference here ?
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not think that my only task should be to repeat the usual
formula and merely welcome you here. We are assembled in this place in order to
accomplish a common task. Our personal endeavour becomes insignificant in comparison
with the great object which has brought us together. It is our intention not to separate
until this first Conference on Rural Hygiene, limited though it be to European countries,
has given the whole world, and particularly the Governments and their technical or
administrative organisations, concrete guidance on certain points which will enable them
to arrive at an actual change in the present state of things so far as concerns all matters
connected with the hygiene of the rural population.
Let us therefore consider more closely what is, in fact, the task of our Conference.
Is it a task of a technical character, of a purely scientific character, or rather of a social
and political nature ?
It is only too obvious that these various forms of activity of the human spirit, these
different ways of dealing with facts and directing our efforts in order to adapt the external
reality and our environment to our aspirations and our ideal, are constantly approaching
each other. It is, indeed, too evident that to-day it is impossible for us to contemplate
a task such as ours unless the technique and the scientific data which are at the basis of
the culture and activities of all of us are directed or turned towards aims of a social and
political nature ; or, if you like, unless questions of a social and political character exercise
an influence over our thoughts, even when we are endeavouring to solve problems which
we regard as exclusively technical or scientific.
I would even like to remind you that the sine qua non for actually carrying out part
of our aspirations in the field of public health consists in never losing sight of the reciprocal
influence and limitations of these two different forms of our mental activities — on the
one side, scientific and technical knowledge and activities ; on the other side, knowledge
and activities of a social and political character.
If we closely examine the history of the successive changes and improvements which
have been brought about in the life of mankind during the last fifty years, we see that the