It is not empty optimism that moves me to a strong hope in the coming year.  We can, if we will, make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.  Beyond the material recovery, I sense a spiritual recovery as well.  The people of America are turning as never before to those permanent values that are not limited to the physical objectives of life.  There are growing signs of this on every hand.  In the face of these spiritual impulses we are sensible of the Divine Providence to which Nations turn now, as always, for guidance and fostering care.

***

State of the Union Address
Franklin D. Roosevelt
January 3, 1936

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and of the House of
Representatives: 

We are about to enter upon another year of the responsibility which the electorate of the United States has placed in our hands.  Having come so far, it is fitting that we should pause to survey the ground which we have covered and the path which lies ahead.

On the fourth day of March, 1933, on the occasion of taking the oath of office as President of the United States, I addressed the people of our country.  Need I recall either the scene or the national circumstances attending the occasion?  The crisis of that moment was almost exclusively a national one.  In recognition of that fact, so obvious to the millions in the streets and in the homes of America, I devoted by far the greater part of that address to what I called, and the Nation called, critical days within our own borders.

You will remember that on that fourth of March, 1933, the world picture was an image of substantial peace.  International consultation and widespread hope for the bettering of relations between the Nations gave to all of us a reasonable expectation that the barriers to mutual confidence, to increased trade, and to the peaceful settlement of disputes could be progressively removed.  In fact, my only reference to the field of world policy in that address was in these words:  “I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—­the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—­a neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”

In the years that have followed, that sentiment has remained the dedication of this Nation.  Among the Nations of the great Western Hemisphere the policy of the good neighbor has happily prevailed.  At no time in the four and a half centuries of modern civilization in the Americas has there existed—­in any year, in any decade, in any generation in all that time—­a greater spirit of mutual understanding, of common helpfulness, and of devotion to the ideals of serf-government than exists today in the twenty-one American Republics and their neighbor, the Dominion of Canada.  This policy of the good neighbor among