I propose to confer within the coming month with small groups of those directly representative
of large employers of labor and of large groups of organized labor in order to seek their
cooperation in establishing what I may describe as a specific trial period of industrial peace.
Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall
permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over
a decade. What may be necessary for those other countries is not my responsibility to
determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary
condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. I do not want to think that it
is the destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief roads. In our efforts for recovery,
we have avoided on the one hand the theory that business should and must be taken over
into an all-embracing government. We have avoided on the other hand the equally untenable
theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise
is in need. I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many
years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged few. I prefer
that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom,
to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of
America.