All the measures of collective security, resistance to aggression, and the building of defenses, constitute the first requirement for the survival and progress of the free world.  But, as I have pointed out, they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and maintain economic and social progress in the free nations.  There can be no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it.  There can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social collapse.  For these reasons, our national policy has included a wide range of economic measures.

In Europe, the grand design of the Marshall Plan permitted the people of Britain and France and Italy and a half dozen other countries, with help from the United States, to lift themselves from stagnation and find again the path of rising production, rising incomes, rising standards of living.  The situation was changed almost overnight by the Marshall Plan; the people of Europe have a renewed hope and vitality, and they are able to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would have been impossible a few years ago.

Now the countries of Europe are moving rapidly towards political and economic unity, changing the map of Europe in more hopeful ways than it has been changed for 500 years.  Customs unions, European economic institutions like the Schuman Plan, the movement toward European political integration, the European Defense Community-all are signs of practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity.  The countries of Western Europe, including the free Republic of Germany are working together, and the whole free world is the gainer.

It sometimes happens, in the course of history, that steps taken to meet an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be apparent at the time.  This, I believe, is the meaning of what has been going on in Europe under the threat of aggression.  The free nations there, with our help, have been drawing together in defense of their free institutions.  In so doing, they have laid the foundations of a unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies of this period of history.  We may, at this close range, be but dimly aware of the creative surge this movement represents, but I believe it to be of historic importance.  I believe its benefits will survive long after communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy memory.

In Asia and Africa, the economic and social problems are different but no less urgent.  There hundreds of millions of people are in ferment, exploding into the twentieth century, thrusting toward equality and independence and improvement in the hard conditions of their lives.

Politically, economically, socially, things cannot and will not stay in their pre-war mold in Africa and Asia.  Change must come—­is coming—­fast.  Just in the years I have been President, 12 free nations, with more than 600 million people, have become independent:  Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Israel, Libya, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, and the three Associated States of Indo-China, now members of the French Union.  These names alone are testimony to the sweep of the great force which is changing the face of half the world.