As I mentioned earlier, our efforts are to give future generations what we never had—­a future free of nuclear terror.  Reduction of strategic offensive arms is one step, SDI another.  Our funding request for our Strategic Defense Initiative is less than 2 percent of the total defense budget.  SDI funding is money wisely appropriated and money well spent.  SDI has the same purpose and supports the same goals of arms reduction.  It reduces the risk of war and the threat of nuclear weapons to all mankind.  Strategic defenses that threaten no one could offer the world a safer, more stable basis for deterrence.  We must also remember that SDI is our insurance policy against a nuclear accident, a Chernobyl of the sky, or an accidental launch or some madman who might come along.

We’ve seen such changes in the world in 7 years.  As totalitarianism struggles to avoid being overwhelmed by the forces of economic advance and the aspiration for human freedom, it is the free nations that are resilient and resurgent.  As the global democratic revolution has put totalitarianism on the defensive, we have left behind the days of retreat.  America is again a vigorous leader of the free world, a nation that acts decisively and firmly in the furtherance of her principles and vital interests.  No legacy would make me more proud than leaving in place a bipartisan consensus for the cause of world freedom, a consensus that prevents a paralysis of American power from ever occurring again.

But my thoughts tonight go beyond this, and I hope you’ll let me end this evening with a personal reflection.  You know, the world could never be quite the same again after Jacob Shallus, a trustworthy and dependable clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, took his pen and engrossed those words about representative government in the preamble of our Constitution.  And in a quiet but final way, the course of human events was forever altered when, on a ridge overlooking the Emmitsburg Pike in an obscure Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke of our duty to government of and by the people and never letting it perish from the Earth.

At the start of this decade, I suggested that we live in equally momentous times, that it is up to us now to decide whether our form of government would endure and whether history still had a place of greatness for a quiet, pleasant, greening land called America.  Not everything has been made perfect in 7 years, nor will it be made perfect in seven times 70 years, but before us, this year and beyond, are great prospects for the cause of peace and world freedom.

It means, too, that the young Americans I spoke of 7 years ago, as well as those who might be coming along the Virginia or Maryland shores this night and seeing for the first time the lights of this Capital City—­the lights that cast their glow on our great halls of government and the monuments to the memory of our great men—­it means those young Americans will find a city of hope in a land that is free.