Many of you are probably reflecting: Why flog a dead horse, why resurrect a now nearly forgotten quarrel? You say to yourselves: The desperate 1930's are a decade and a half behind us; and our private and public economies have both readjusted to respond to the possibility of another similar decline in the employment of resources. Then there are those of you who with me are still troubled, perhaps as much as was Macbeth by Banquo's ghost. While we have thought we had stabbed deeply, we have not laid stagnation's ghost. It still hovers around deaf to our defense of these many years past against a thesis which envisaged a maturing of the American economy to the point of stagnation. It haunts us in some of the utterings on the price-parity doctrine and on the guaranteed annual wages; and it takes another form on the other side of the graveyard in the demands for a balanced budget when the Treasury should be showing surpluses. That we did not stab deep enough is quite apparent. To my knowledge there is no one rational who denies the possibility of a decline of the rate of growth of the private enterprise economy. The quarrel has really raged over the arguments supporting the claim and not the possibility. As for myself, I have never been too happy with the debate over the theory, with either side of it. And I have been most unhappy with the role that I have sought to play. Ever since Lord Keynes sounded the first discordant notes of secular stagnation-notes taken up and built into a crescendo by Alvin Hansen, Oscar Lange, Benjamin Higgins, and numerous others-I have believed the stagnation theory as it developed deficient in certain respects, whose exact form managed to puzzle my poor powers of perception. In casting about for a different background against which to portray my argument, I have shifted my own position in a direction that I find hard to plot. What I shall attempt to do this evening is to state this position as clearly as