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.

There are, in fact, nearly a million Americans serving their country and the cause of freedom in overseas posts, a record no other people can match.  Surely those of us who stay at home should be glad to help indirectly; by supporting our aid programs; .by opening our doors to foreign visitors and diplomats and students; and by proving, day by day, by deed as well as word, that we are a just and generous people.

VI.

Third, what comfort can we take from the increasing strains and tensions within the Communist bloc?  Here hope must be tempered with caution.  For the Soviet-Chinese disagreement is over means, not ends.  A dispute over how best to bury the free world is no grounds for Western rejoicing.

Nevertheless, while a strain is not a fracture, it is clear that the forces of diversity are at work inside the Communist camp, despite all the iron disciplines of regimentation and all the iron dogmatisms of ideology.  Marx is proven wrong once again:  for it is the closed Communist societies, not the free and open societies which carry within themselves the seeds of internal disintegration.

The disarray of the Communist empire has been heightened by two other formidable forces.  One is the historical force of nationalism—­and the yearning of all men to be free.  The other is the gross inefficiency of their economies.  For a closed society is not open to ideas of progress—­and a police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

New nations asked to choose between two competing systems need only compare conditions in East and West Germany, Eastern and Western Europe, North and South Viet-Nam.  They need only compare the disillusionment of Communist Cuba with the promise of the Alliance for Progress.  And all the world knows that no successful system builds a wall to keep its people in and freedom out—­and the wall of shame dividing Berlin is a symbol of Communist failure.