266 State Papers and Addresses

France shall never become our fate, that such celebrations as these are being
promoted by Legion Posts, and other patriotic groups, throughout the length
and breath of our Country.

Because such peaceful assemblages as this are still possible in America,
and because we, alone of all the peoples of the world's democracies, still find
our freedom and our individual liberty untrammeled, let us not, however,
envelop ourselves in any false feeling of security: —Let us not delude our-
selves into believing that simply because our free American way of life has
never been interrupted, that it never will be.

We cannot afford to look upon the struggles raging in the world today
merely as isolated conflicts in which certain countries are seeking material
gains, and material gains alone. The world upheaval now in progress goes
far, far deeper than that. It is rather a gigantic battle for survival between
the God-given democratic system of government, with its basis of individual
rights and the dignity of man as an individual; and the strange new theory
of government that would wipe out all claims of the individual to recognition,
and that makes of everyone merely a puppet to be pushed around and used
and possibly ultimately destroyed, for an elusive thing known as "the good
of the state. "

"America will not, and cannot, " he asserted, "accept the principles laid
down by the leaders of the countries that have adopted this new, non-human
theory of government. Americans will never accept it because, from the very
founding of our republic, the dignity of man as an individual, and the fact
that he has certain inalienable God-given rights, have been recognized and
accepted, and upon such recognition and acceptance this Country has been
developed. In the very Constitution of our Country, a Constitution drawn up
by far-sighted Legislators whose good judgment has been acclaimed for more
than a century and a half there is set down the definite pronouncement that
, man is an individual in his own right, and that he is subject as such in the
final analysis only to the Creator who made him. "

Set down in this Constitution is the dogma that "All men are created
equal. " Here is a wording that in itself accepts and proclaims the belief that
man did not merely evolve, he did not merely happen, but he was created by
a Superior Power. The Constitution goes on to define that man was endowed
by this Creator with certain inalienable rights which include the free pursuit
of life, liberty and happiness.

What it would be like to live under a system of government that would
deny to us those fundamental rights, we as American citizens cannot conceive.
We have been so accustomed from our childhood to avail ourselves of the
rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution, that life under a government
that would deprive us of those rights would be a sorry existence indeed. We
have been so accustomed to these rights, however, that perhaps at times we
have taken them too much for granted, never stopping to think that we were
among a favored minority in the world to whom their government was a
servant, and not a harsh master.

Since the events of the past year have taken place, however; since Poland
was over-run, and Austria and Czechoslovakia; and particularly since Belgium,
Holland and even proud France have felt the heel of the conqueror, millions
of Americans who never before gave a thought to their exceptional status as