I am proud of a program that has helped to arm and feed and clothe millions of people who live on the front lines of freedom.

I am especially proud that this country has put forward for the 60’s a vast cooperative effort to achieve economic growth and social progress throughout the Americas—­the Alliance for Progress.

I do not underestimate the difficulties that we face in this mutual effort among our close neighbors, but the free states of this hemisphere, working in close collaboration, have begun to make this alliance a living reality.  Today it is feeding one out of every four school age children in Latin America an extra food ration from our farm surplus.  It has distributed 1.5 million school books and is building 17,000 classrooms.  It has helped resettle tens of thousands of farm families on land they can call their own.  It is stimulating our good neighbors to more self-help and self-reform—­fiscal, social, institutional, and land reforms.  It is bringing new housing and hope, new health and dignity, to millions who were forgotten.  The men and women of this hemisphere know that the alliance cannot succeed if it is only another name for United States handouts—­that it can succeed only as the Latin American nations themselves devote their best effort to fulfilling its goals.

This story is the same in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Asia.  Wherever nations are willing to help themselves, we stand ready to help them build new bulwarks of freedom.  We are not purchasing votes for the cold war; we have gone to the aid of imperiled nations, neutrals and allies alike.  What we do ask—­and all that we ask—­is that our help be used to best advantage, and that their own efforts not be diverted by needless quarrels with other independent nations.

Despite all its past achievements, the continued progress of the Mutual Assistance Program requires a persistent discontent with present performance.  We have been reorganizing this program to make it a more effective, efficient instrument—­and that process will continue this year.

But free world development will still be an uphill struggle.  Government aid can only supplement the role of private investment, trade expansion, commodity stabilization, and, above all, internal self-improvement.  The processes of growth are gradual—­bearing fruit in a decade, not a day.  Our successes will be neither quick nor dramatic.  But if these programs were ever to be ended, our failures in a dozen countries would be sudden and certain.

Neither money nor technical assistance, however, can be our only weapon against poverty.  In the end, the crucial effort is one of purpose, requiring the fuel of finance but also a torch of idealism.  And nothing carries the spirit of this American idealism more effectively to the far corners of the earth than the American Peace Corps.

A year ago, less than 900 Peace Corps volunteers were on the job.  A year from now they will number more than 9,000—­men and women, aged 18 to 79, willing to give 2 years of their lives to helping people in other lands.