The last 3 years bear witness to our determination to make this a better country.

We have struck down legal barriers to equality.

We have improved the education of 7 million deprived children and this year alone we have enabled almost 1 million students to go to college.

We have brought medical care to older people who were unable to afford it.  Three and one-half million Americans have already received treatment under Medicare since July.

We have built a strong economy that has put almost 3 million more Americans on the payrolls in the last year alone.

We have included more than 9 million new workers under a higher minimum wage.

We have launched new training programs to provide job skills for almost 1 million Americans.

We have helped more than a thousand local communities to attack poverty in the neighborhoods of the poor.  We have set out to rebuild our cities on a scale that has never been attempted before.  We have begun to rescue our waters from the menace of pollution and to restore the beauty of our land and our countryside, our cities and our towns.

We have given 1 million young Americans a chance to earn through the Neighborhood Youth Corps—­or through Head Start, a chance to learn.

So together we have tried to meet the needs of our people.  And, we have succeeded in creating a better life for the many as well as the few.  Now we must answer whether our gains shall be the foundations of further progress, or whether they shall be only monuments to what might have been—­abandoned now by a people who lacked the will to see their great work through.

I believe that our people do not want to quit—­though the task is great, the work hard, often frustrating, and success is a matter not of days or months, but of years—­and sometimes it may be even decades.  II.

I have come here tonight to discuss with you five ways of carrying forward the progress of these last 3 years.  These five ways concern programs, partnerships, priorities, prosperity, and peace.

First, programs.  We must see to it, I think, that these new programs that we have passed work effectively and are administered in the best possible way.

Three years ago we set out to create these new instruments of social progress.  This required trial and error—­and it has produced both.  But as we learn, through success and failure, we are changing our strategy and we are trying to improve our tactics.  In the long run, these starts—­some rewarding, others inadequate and disappointing—­are crucial to success.

One example is the struggle to make life better for the less fortunate among us.

On a similar occasion, at this rostrum in 1949, I heard a great American President, Harry S. Truman, declare this:  “The American people have decided that poverty is just as wasteful and just as unnecessary as preventable disease.”