It is a source of great pleasure to me, as it must be to all our friends here, that we are once again able to meet in an International Conference after the long years of war and its aftermath. I need not speak of what the War has meant to national welfare or the private lives of many here. But it was inevitable that it should have gravely affected the progress of the cultural studies to which this Institute is devoted, not merely because it has made so serious an interruption in their pursuit, but because it has for a time severed the international contacts and broken up the intellectual partnerships on which much of the vitality of our work depended. Even to-day, it is not easy to foresee the time when some of these partnerships can be resumed in their old form, much as we might ourselves hope that changes in national relations should not be an obstacle to association in the field of cultural studies.