of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 485

of Washington, who conducted and won an eight-year war for independence
against incredible odds; the tenacity of Grant, who said "We'll fight it out on
this line if it takes all winter"; the tenacity of Lee, whose bare-footed, half-
starved soldiers literally worshipped him, whether in victory or defeat; —these
examples are proverbial over the wide-world of American military leadership
and military genius. •

We can feel confident that the American love of freedom, the hatred of
tyranny, the will to do-or-die, if you will, —that these things are still quick in
American hearts today, and will not fail us in any emergency. Brave soldiers—
brilliant leadership in the field and on the seas—yes! But these alone will not
insure our national safety. We must have solidarity at the core. We must
have, in a single phrase, unity of purpose throughout the whole frame and
substance of our national being.

Or let us take this matter from another viewpoint. It is not necessary
to prove that we are living in a mechanized age. We cannot go from home to
office without showing our dependence on machinery. In the most literal sense,
the horse and buggy days are gone. The world will leave us standing on the
doorstep if we wait for old Dobbin to be hitched up to the shay. The auto-
mobile, the airplane, the telephone, the radio, are words so commonplace they
are on the tongues of every child.

Our peace-time ways of living are geared to machinery—and the way of
living has been panzerized, so to speak. Here again we have led the world.
Call the roll of American inventors—Fulton, Edison, the Wright brothers—as
many as you wish. American genius has expressed itself clearly and repeatedly.
The skill of free American Labor has out-produced the sweat shops of the world.
It has done so in peace—it has done, and can again do so in war.

Confidence—yes! The American talent for invention—the American skill
at mass production—these we are proud of; these we can count on.

Are they sufficient unto themselves ? Candidly and for the record, they are
not! No nation can survive without unity of purpose.

So let us investigate our strength. No one can deny that it is great.
No one can gainsay our intention to "follow through" to the hilt. Yet it
would be folly and negligence to say that our effort is at capacity—that our
teamwork has reached perfection. Only a misguided person shuts his eyes
to his own mistakes. Smugness was never yet an admirable trait. A person,
or a nation, unable to see his or its faults will never improve. And to improve
is what we have to do today. There are monkey wrenches in our machinery,
there are corks in our bottlenecks, there are saboteurs at work against our
national unity of purpose.

It is a time for being frank. The hour is to come to take off the gloves
and come directly to grip with these matters that concern us so nearly and so
vitally.

Who then—and what then—constitute the interference with America's
all-out efficiency ? I shall name a few.

First, there are those who might be called doubters. I mean those men
you meet on the street or in your offices and shops and factories—yes, even in