We refuse the European solution of using the unemployed to build up excessive armaments which eventually result in dictatorships and war.  We encourage an American way—­through an increase of national income which is the only way we can be sure will take up the slack.  Much progress has been made; much remains to be done.

We recognize that we must find an answer in terms of work and opportunity.

The unemployment problem today has become very definitely a problem of youth as well as of age.  As each year has gone by hundreds of thousands of boys and girls have come of working age.  They now form an army of unused youth.  They must be an especial concern of democratic Government.

We must continue, above all things, to look for a solution of their special problem.  For they, looking ahead to life, are entitled to action on our part and not merely to admonitions of optimism or lectures on economic laws.

Some in our midst have sought to instill a feeling of fear and defeatism in the minds of the American people about this problem.

To face the task of finding jobs faster than invention can take them away—­is not defeatism.  To warble easy platitudes that if we would only go back to ways that have failed, everything would be all right—­is not courage.

In 1933 we met a problem of real fear and real defeatism.  We faced the facts—­with action and not with words alone.

The American people will reject the doctrine of fear, confident that in the ’thirties we have been building soundly a new order of things, different from the order of the ’twenties.  In this dawn of the decade of the ’forties, with our program of social improvement started, we will continue to carry on the processes of recovery, so as to preserve our gains and provide jobs at living wages.

There are, of course, many other items of great public interest which could be enumerated in this message—­the continued conservation of our natural resources, the improvement of health and of education, the extension of social security to larger groups, the freeing of large areas from restricted transportation discriminations, the extension of the merit system and many others.

Our continued progress in the social and economic field is important not only for the significance of each part of it but for the total effect which our program of domestic betterment has upon that most valuable asset of a nation in dangerous times—­its national unity.

The permanent security of America in the present crisis does not lie in armed force alone.  What we face is a set of world-wide forces of disintegration—­vicious, ruthless, destructive of all the moral, religious and political standards which mankind, after centuries of struggle, has come to cherish most.

In these moral values, in these forces which have made our nation great, we must actively and practically reassert our faith.