To seize that initiative, I shall shortly send to the Congress a new five-year Trade Expansion Action, far-reaching in scope but designed with great care to make certain that its benefits to our people far outweigh any risks.  The bill will permit the gradual elimination of tariffs here in the United States and in the Common Market on those items in which we together supply 80 percent of the world’s trade—­mostly items in which our own ability to compete is demonstrated by the fact that we sell abroad, in these items, substantially more than we import.  This step will make it possible for our major industries to compete with their counterparts in Western Europe for access to European consumers.

On other goods the bill will permit a gradual reduction of duties up to 50 percent—­permitting bargaining by major categories—­and provide for appropriate and tested forms of assistance to firms and employees adjusting to import competition.  We are not neglecting the safeguards provided by peril points, an escape clause, or the National Security Amendment.  Nor are we abandoning our non-European friends or our traditional “most-favored nation” principle.  On the contrary, the bill will provide new encouragement for their sale of tropical agricultural products, so important to our friends in Latin America, who have long depended upon the European market, who now find themselves faced with new challenges which we must join with them in overcoming.

Concessions, in this bargaining, must of course be reciprocal, not unilateral.  The Common Market will not fulfill its own high promise unless its outside tariff walls are low.  The dangers of restriction or timidity in our own policy have counterparts for our friends in Europe.  For together we face a common challenge:  to enlarge the prosperity of free men everywhere—­to build in partnership a new trading community in which all free nations may gain from the productive energy of free competitive effort.

These various elements in our foreign policy lead, as I have said, to a single goal—­the goal of a peaceful world of free and independent states.  This is our guide for the present and our vision for the future—­a free community of nations, independent but interdependent, uniting north and south, east and west, in one great family of man, outgrowing and transcending the hates and fears that rend our age.

We will not reach that goal today, or tomorrow.  We may not reach it in our own lifetime.  But the quest is the greatest adventure of our century.  We sometimes chafe at the burden of our obligations, the complexity of our decisions, the agony of our choices.  But there is no comfort or security for us in evasion, no solution in abdication, no relief in irresponsibility.