We have been too tolerant of our surroundings and too willing to leave it to others to clean up our environment.  It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on themselves.  Each of us must resolve that each day he will leave his home, his property, the public places of the city or town a little cleaner, a little better, a little more pleasant for himself and those around him.

With the help of people we can do anything, and without their help, we can do nothing.  In this spirit, together, we can reclaim our land for ours and generations to come.

Between now and the year 2000, over 100 million children will be born in the United States.  Where they grow up—­and how—­will, more than any one thing, measure the quality of American life in these years ahead.

This should be a warning to us.

For the past 30 years our population has also been growing and shifting.  The result is exemplified in the vast areas of rural America emptying out of people and of promise—­a third of our counties lost population in the sixties.

The violent and decayed central cities of our great metropolitan complexes are the most conspicuous area of failure in American life today.

I propose that before these problems become insoluble, the Nation develop a national growth policy.

In the future, government decisions as to where to build highways, locate airports, acquire land, or sell land should be made with a clear objective of aiding a balanced growth for America.

In particular, the Federal Government must be in a position to assist in the building of new cities and the rebuilding of old ones.

At the same time, we will carry our concern with the quality of life in America to the farm as well as the suburb, to the village as well as to the city.  What rural America needs most is a new kind of assistance.  It needs to be dealt with, not as a separate nation, but as part of an overall growth policy for America.  We must create a new rural environment which will not only stem the migration to urban centers, but reverse it.  If we seize our growth as a challenge, we can make the 1970’s an historic period when by conscious choice we transformed our land into what we want it to become.

America, which has pioneered in the new abundance, and in the new technology, is called upon today to pioneer in meeting the concerns which have followed in their wake—­in turning the wonders of science to the service of man.

In the majesty of this great Chamber we hear the echoes of America’s history, of debates that rocked the Union and those that repaired it, of the summons to war and the search for peace, of the uniting of the people, the building of a nation.

Those echoes of history remind us of our roots and our strengths.

They remind us also of that special genius of American democracy, which at one critical turning point after another has led us to spot the new road to the future and given us the wisdom and the courage to take it.