450 - State Papers and Addresses

are trespassed, then the State will collapse anyhow, in that it ceases to be the
expression of the will of its people.

We live in an age when certain men are trying to falsify this age-old
axiom. They are saying: "No! It is not true that individual liberties support
the existence of the social states. Give us a strong enough state, and let the
personal liberties go. " And if one asks "What about Law?", these men answer,
"We are the Law. Nothing else matters. "

That is the challenge that Democracy faces today. That is the pagan
code, that is the barbarian's creed—and it rises before us, alas, not as a verbal
argument, but as a mailed and bloody fist, seeking to beat out the brains of
humanity so that humanity cannot think any more. It would compel men who
have learned to walk upright and to lift their thoughts to lofty hopes, to bow
their heads and bend their necks and think no more—but only obey the self-
appointed master.

We know, of course, that this challenge has met with military opposition,
and that our sister Democracy across the seas is giving blow-for-blow against
this black shape of barbarism. We know that our own Country is preparing,
and is now prepared, to gird for any battle that is put upon us.

That is as it should be. But that is not all. It is quite too easy to forget
in these days of danger and disaster that we must uphold in civil life the same
things we are willing to defend in fatal conflict. I have said that our
American conception of Law is in essence a definition of Democracy. We must
still, now as much as ever before, maintain this balance between man's rights
and State sovereignty.

It is a difficult and delicate task facing the Chief Executives of our States
today in this important matter of Law Enforcement, but a task the proper
handling of which will constitute a most significant contribution to the security
of our Nation and all its people.

It is an opportunity for us not only to carry on a governmental function
of the deepest significance for the general safety and security, but also to help
reassert, by evidencing anew their inherent vitality and adaptability, the basic
importance of the States as individual units of this free Government founded
on the God-given principle of individual freedom and self-determination.

Fortunately, we find at our backs a people united in thought and will—a
people appreciative of their rights and privileges as free men and women, and
ready to sacrifice all else rather than yield these rights and privileges.

I have a deep, insuperable faith that the people of the United States will
prove themselves in this emergency, as they have in all the emergencies of the
past, unfalteringly loyal to the institutions and principles which have made
them free and great as a Nation.

The conviction lives within me that against the dark shadow of despotism
and dictatorships there still will continue, to flame the unquenchable beacon of
American Freedom, and that, in the land illumined by that glow, the evils
of despotism shall never take root or flourish.

Despite the dictators and their false ideologies, despite the subversive