I welcome your views, as I have welcomed working with you for 30 years as a colleague and as Vice President and President.

I should like to say to the Members of the opposition—­whose numbers, if I am not mistaken, seem to have increased somewhat—­that the genius of the American political system has always been best expressed through creative debate that offers choices and reasonable alternatives.  Throughout our history, great Republicans and Democrats have seemed to understand this.  So let there be light and reason in our relations.  That is the way to a responsible session and a responsive government.

Let us be remembered as a President and a Congress who tried to improve the quality of life for every American—­not just the rich, not just the poor, but every man, woman, and child in this great Nation of ours.

We all go to school—­to good schools or bad schools.  We all take air into our lungs—­clean air or polluted air.  We all drink water—­pure water or polluted water.  We all face sickness someday, and some more often than we wish, and old age as well.  We all have a stake in this Great Society—­in its economic growth, in reduction of civil strife—­a great stake in good government.

We just must not arrest the pace of progress we have established in this country in these years.  Our children’s children will pay the price if we are not wise enough, and courageous enough, and determined enough to stand up and meet the Nation’s needs as well as we can in the time allotted us.  III.

Abroad, as at home, there is also risk in change.  But abroad, as at home, there is a greater risk in standing still.  No part of our foreign policy is so sacred that it ever remains beyond review.  We shall be flexible where conditions in the world change—­and where man’s efforts can change them for the better.

We are in the midst of a great transition—­a transition from narrow nationalism to international partnership; from the harsh spirit of the cold war to the hopeful spirit of common humanity on a troubled and a threatened planet.

In Latin America, the American chiefs of state will be meeting very shortly to give our hemispheric policies new direction.

We have come a long way in this hemisphere since the inter-American effort in economic and social development was launched by the conference at Bogota in 1960 under the leadership of President Eisenhower.  The Alliance for Progress moved dramatically forward under President Kennedy.  There is new confidence that the voice of the people is being heard; that the dignity of the individual is stronger than ever in this hemisphere, and we are facing up to and meeting many of the hemispheric problems together.  In this hemisphere that reform under democracy can be made to happen—­because it has happened.  So together, I think, we must now move to strike down the barriers to full cooperation among the American nations, and to free the energies and the resources of two great continents on behalf of all of our citizens.