Conference Always Modifies and Improves Thought
I would like to ask if this is not the experience of every person here who has ever acted in any conference of any kind. Did you ever go out of a conference with exactly the same views with which you went in? If you did, I am sorry for you, you must be thought-tight. For my part I can testify that I never carried a scheme into a conference without having it profoundly modified by the criticism of the other men in the conference and without recognizing when I came out that the product of the common council bestowed upon it was very much superior to any private thought that might have been used for its development. The processes of attrition, the contributions to consensus of minds, the compromises of thought create those general movements which are the streams of tendency and the streams of development.