Having read the list of previous lectures under this Foundation, it is with the greatest diffidence that I address you this evening. Not only must I follow men of high academic distinction. My old chief, Sir John Russell French, during whose tenure of office as General Manager I joined the service of the Bank of New South Wales, delivered the fourth Joseph Fisher Lecture. He spoke in 1910 on the subject, “Banking as a Factor in the Development of Trade and Commerce”. Those were halcyon days, when bankers, in common with other Australians, viewed their task as one of assisting in an expansion to which imagination set scarcely any limit. Much has happened since to dispel the mirage of infinite development. We no longer take it for granted that these Southern Dominions live in a happy world of their own, remote from Europe's wars and America's racial hates. Indeed, the remark of my immediate predecessor, Professor T. E. Gregory, that we in Australia had probably never heard of the Wall Street boom because we had one of our own, seems to-day almost savage in its irony. It was a little unkind even when it was uttered in 1930. Your own State of South Australia had emerged from its latest boom long before the middle of 1929, when some in Wall Street were still speculating on a “new era” of permanent prosperity and the rest were speculating on their fellow speculators.