It is sometimes said that economists show an unworthy preference for the safe side of prophecy-for writing and speaking after the event. But I shall not be too rash, I hope, if I suggest that one of the main differences between the economic data with which Sir Edward Gonner and Professor J. R. Bellerby, my distinguished predecessors, had to deal during their tenure of this Chair and the economic data which will concern economists for the next two or three decades will be found in the violent change in governmental economic policy that has taken place during the last few years. I am speaking now not merely of the reversion of this country to a protective system, for that is just a symptom of a deeper world change. I refer to the whole group of official measures which have been aimed at modifying the existing structure and organisation of industry, at the regulation of prices and output and at the maintenance of a particular distribution of productive resources. We have seen, in fact, the drastic modification, in some countries the final overthrow, of that system of free enterprise which spread from Great Britain over a large part of the world in the nineteenth century.