And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.
I say this now to this Seventy-eighth Congress, because it is wholly possible that freedom from want--the right of employment, the right of assurance against life’s hazards--will loom very large as a task of America during the coming two years.
I trust it will not be regarded as an issue--but rather as a task for all of us to study sympathetically, to work out with a constant regard for the attainment of the objective, with fairness to all and with injustice to none.
In this war of survival we must keep before our minds not only the evil things we fight against but the good things we are fighting for. We fight to retain a great past--and we fight to gain a greater future.
Let us remember, too, that economic safety for the America of the future is threatened unless a greater economic stability comes to the rest of the world. We cannot make America an island in either a military or an economic sense. Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism.
Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory in the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement of the security of man here and throughout the world--and, finally, striving for the fourth freedom--freedom from fear.
It is of little account for any of us to talk of essential human needs, of attaining security, if we run the risk of another World War in ten or twenty or fifty years. That is just plain common sense. Wars grow in size, in death and destruction, and in the inevitability of engulfing all Nations, in inverse ratio to the shrinking size of the world as a result of the conquest of the air. I shudder to think of what will happen to humanity, including ourselves, if this war ends in an inconclusive peace, and another war breaks out when the babies of today have grown to fighting age.
Every normal American prays that neither he nor his sons nor his grandsons will be compelled to go through this horror again.
Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this Nation can end this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and pull the hole in after them.
But we have learned that we can never dig a hole so deep that it would be safe against predatory animals. We have also learned that if we do not pull the fangs of the predatory animals of this world, they will multiply and grow in strength--and they will be at our throats again once more in a short generation.