sed my solemn oath of service to
you.

I, too, am a witness, today testifying in your name to the principles
and purposes to which we, as a people, are pledged.

Before all else, we seek, upon our common labor as a nation, the
blessings of Almighty God. And the hopes in our hearts fashion the
deepest prayers of our whole people.

May we pursue the right--without self-righteousness.

May we know unity--without conformity.

May we grow in strength--without pride in self.

May we, in our dealings with all peoples of the earth, ever speak truth
and serve justice.

And so shall America--in the sight of all men of good will--prove true
to the honorable purposes that bind and rule us as a people in all this
time of trial through which we pass.

We live in a land of plenty, but rarely has this earth known such peril
as today.

In our nation work and wealth abound. Our population grows. Commerce
crowds our rivers and rails, our skies, harbors, and highways. Our soil
is fertile, our agriculture productive. The air rings with the song
of our industry--rolling mills and blast furnaces, dynamos, dams, and
assembly lines--the chorus of America the bountiful.

This is our home--yet this is not the whole of our world. For our
world is where our full destiny lies--with men, of all people, and all
nations, who are or would be free. And for them--and so for us--this is
no time of ease or of rest.

In too much of the earth there is want, discord, danger. New forces and
new nations stir and strive across the earth, with power to bring, by
their fate, great good or great evil to the free world's future. From
the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one
third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new
freedom; freedom from grinding poverty. Across all continents, nearly a
billion people seek, sometimes almost in desperation, for the skills
and knowledge and assistance by which they may satisfy from their own
resources, the material wants common to all mankind.

No nation, however old or great, escapes this tempest of change and
turmoil. Some, impoverished by the recent World War, seek to restore
their means of livelihood. In the heart of Europe, Germany still stands
tragically divided. So is the whole continent divided. And so, too, is
all the world.

The divisive force is International Communism and the power that it
controls.

The designs of that power, dark in purpose, are clear