The New Deal

Herbert Hoover Speeches

MORALS IN GOVERNMENT

Address delivered to Joint Republican Organizations

Kansas City, Missouri

September 28, 1938

MR. ROOSEVELT has now offered the New Deal as the basis of a new political party.  He summons all liberals to join or be cast into outer darkness.  I absolutely reject his interpretation of the terms Liberal and Conservative.

I propose to explore this proposed party, not by their theories or their professions, but by the test of the greatest Leader humanity has ever known, who said:  "By their fruits ye shall know them.”

I propose to make three addresses in this exploration.  I shall, on this first occasion, deal with morals in government.  At Hartford, Connecticut, I shall have something to say as to the economic consequences.

That is represented by 11,000,000 men out of jobs, by farm prices lower in gold than ever in our history, and by the burden of debt which will blight opportunities for youth in America.

And in all cases, I shall suggest some lights for those in the outer darkness.  Those lights will not be will-o'-the-wisps.

When we come to questions of immorality in government there can be no soft and respectful argument.  The only emotion appropriate to immorality in indignation.  That is the time to take the gloves off.  They are off.

These moral forces which affect the character and the soul of a people will control in its destinies.  Where they enter government they far transcend all political partisanship.  The progress of mankind is in proportion to the advancement of truth and justice.  Standards of truth and justice are what we usually call morals.

I have little need to define moral standards.  The American people learn them at their mothers' knees.  They include not only money honesty.  They include telling the whole truth.  They include keeping one's word.  They include fidelity to public trust.

They exclude hypocrisy.  They exclude creation of hate.  Half-truth, hypocrisy and hate are departments in the art of demagogues.  The polite phrase for all this is intellectual dishonesty.

It is moral standards in government which create sturdy self-reliance and self-respect among citizens.  It is moral standards that create perceptions of what degrades the faith of a people in self-government.

During the last six years the growth of the cancerous idea that there are two standards of morals in American life has been foisted on the American people.  That malignant idea is that political morals are a lower code than private morals.  The apology for this double standard for government has been that the end, or to use New Deal words, "the objective,” justifies the means.  That is, if you can get away with it.  That is the very gospel of dictatorship.  That whole idea is a violation of the very foundation of Christian ethics.  Wrong conduct creates moral degeneration which defeats the end.  In practice it works out that government must be conducted by fooling the majority of the people all the time or buying them part of the time.

When citizens are crooked among themselves the damage falls mostly upon themselves.  And it may affect their chances in the Life Eternal.  But when government is immoral, it damages the morals of a whole people.

And let me say at once I do not claim that political morals have been perfect in this Republic under any political party.  There have been sporadic incidents and there have been black spots which have been our shame.  But during the past six years there has been systematic degeneration.

If the standards of honor, sincerity, and truth in public life are to differ from those we learned at our mothers' knees then this Republic is lost.  It is the moral slide more even than the economic degeneration that in the last twenty years has carried nation after nation over the precipice to dictatorship.

I propose to illustrate what I mean with a few examples.  In this single address I can deal only with seven or eight.  If you look around you will be able to collect others.

SAMPLE I

The foremost of the New Deal Party's alphabetical morals is the G.E.A.A. -- Get Elected Anyhow Anyway.

For fifty years the American people have fought the politicians to dig out the spoils system.  They fought not alone to stop corruption but to stop government employees from packing elections.  They built a great moral dike of non-political selection by merit.  In six years we have lost forty years of the ground gained by that moral crusade.

At the end of my Administration 83 percent of all Federal employees had been selected upon merit by the Civil Service Commission.  That is the highest figure ever attained.  And if a Democratic Congress had been willing it would have been 95 percent.

During the six years of Mr. Roosevelt's Administration over 300,000 office holders have been politically appointed to the Federal government.  They are without the merit requirement of the Civil Service.  And that does not include some 100,000 part-time committee members.  As such committee members get little pay Republicans are sometimes eligible.  Politics has been the first test of merit in the 300,000.  Andrew Jackson's dream of spoils rose to only four or five thousand.

The excuse that the appointment of this 300,000 outside the Civil Service was necessary in an emergency is sheer hypocrisy.  Woodrow Wilson did not desert the merit system or non-political appointments during his great emergency of the War.  Recently Mr. Roosevelt proposed to enlist part of this army into the merit service by executive order.  New Deal executive orders are not proof of merit.

If you can find any of that Roosevelt three to four hundred thousand who are not interfering with a free ballot in this campaign, it is because their bosses have slipped up.  We saw his political army turned on to purge non-conformist Democrats from the New Deal Liberal Party.

And this spoils system has other implications besides interference with a free ballot.  It degrades public life.  By example it pollutes every local government.  Working for the government becomes a racket not a career.  Unless this patronage system is destroyed it will destroy this republic.

This New Deal army of political appointees is the American form of the Praetorian Guard of Ancient Rome.  That political band had similar habits in making elections foolproof.  They were also active in the decline and fall of the morals of the Roman Empire.  We have, however, improved the Roman practice.  Our three to four hundred thousand of New Deal political employees are the officers of an army of ten million voters who receive benefits from the government.

SAMPLE II

And this brings me to Sample No. II, concerning the activity of these officers.  But it will need a moment's background.

In 1930 as President I announced that as a nation we "must prevent hunger and cold to those of our people who are in honest difficulties.”  And I undertook the organization of their relief.  I had had some years' experience elsewhere with the moral and political dangers in relief.  I determined that America should not be subjected to those calamities.  To prevent this we say to it that non-partisan committees of leading citizens were established in some 3000 communities, where relief was needed.  These committees were given the full responsibility of administration.  These committees were unpaid.  They had no vested interest in keeping unemployment going.  At the start their money support was local.  As the situation deepened, first the States and finally the Federal government gave financial aid to these committees.  Parallel with this, we greatly expanded useful Public Works at regular pay and full-time employment.

At this point I may wipe away a current New Deal crocodile tear.  And that wells constantly out of their emotion that they were the first Administration with human sympathy or to give real relief to the distressed.  They admit now that when they took over the government in 1933, our relief organization was regularly providing for over 5,400,000 distressed homes of over 21,000,000 persons.  And these figures did not include Federal Public Works, nor the special service to 400,000 veterans.  What the New Deal in fact did was to wreck this system of local, non-partisan administration and substitute a political administration centralized in Washington.  After six years the practical relief situation instead of being better is worse.  The moral consequences have been degrading to the whole people.

Under local administration there was a summoning of community sympathy, a desire to help not alone with relief but with jobs and with encouragement.  Today instead of being viewed as unfortunate and entitled to aid these Americans are being unjustly ridiculed as lazy parasites.  But worse than even this, great numbers of self-reliant people are being inexorably molded into the hopelessness of a permanent army of relief.  A hierarchy of officials is being built whose jobs depend on keeping people on relief.  And American youth is being poured into this mould.  It is sheer madness.  A class wall of hate and fear of those on relief is growing daily.

And now, national sympathy is being defied by politics.  Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams handle billions of your money given for relief of these distressed people.  Messrs. Hopkins and Williams have the power in this Republic to say who shall have bread and who shall not.

You will recollect the trick words by which these men this last June effectually told people on relief how to vote -- or else.

Ripped of all disguises and all intellectual dishonesty, the statements of these men were a direction to these millions and their wives and relatives how to vote.

The New Deal Senatorial Committee whitewashed those trick statements as inoffensive.  Messrs. Hopkins and Williams know the millions of WPA workers understand the English language even if these Senators do not.

Even if these gentlemen had never made these remarks there is scarcely one of the thousands of appointees that direct the SPA who was selected under the non-partisan Civil Service.  They were selected with the approval -- or something stronger -- of some Democratic County Chairman, some New Deal Congressman, or some other political person.  It was in fact entirely superfluous for Messrs. Hopkins and Williams to have uttered a hint.  These politicians will do the hinting to those distressed people anyway.

And the commanders of this detachment of the Praetorian Guard are even bolder.  In the few months just prior to the 1934 Congressional election and the 1936 Presidential election, the business situation was improving.  There was much less need for relief.  A Congressional Committee has shown that nevertheless in those election months the number of people assisted by relief was greatly expanded.  It also showed that in the same months in the off years they were greatly decreased.  This was said to be a coincidence.

Again we approach an election.  Again the business situation is improving and private jobs are increasing.  But again more voters are being put on relief.  No doubt this is also a coincidence.

If we want proof of this use of relief for pressure on the votes of distressed peoples we may turn to the recent record.  The hideous morals of these actions in a free Republic were denounced by a few Democratic Senators whole morals rise above elections.  Democratic Senator Hatch proposed a law in the Senate designed to stop relief officials from using relief for vote-getting purposes.  The Senator said, "Those who believe that out in the counties and in the cities and in the precincts this instrumentality which we have set up is not being used for political purposes are more credulous than I am.”

However, Senator Barkley, President Roosevelt's selected leader of the Senate, led the opposition to Senator Hatch's motion.  The motion was defeated by President Roosevelt's rubber-stamp followers in the Senate.

Would this law have been defeated if President Roosevelt had breathed one whisper of approval for it?  Or better, if he had expressed one word of indignation at the action of his supporters in the Senate?  Instead, Mr. Roosevelt journeyed to Kentucky to endorse the re-election of Senator Barkley.

And this sample in Kentucky could not be unknown to Mr. Roosevelt.  Some months ago the Democratic Scripps-Howard papers courageously exposed the use of the WPA in Kentucky "as a grand political racket in which taxpayer is the victim.”  Harry Hopkins as usual denounced the reporter as untruthful.  Later on, even the Senate Committee, after investigation, had to stigmatize this stench.  They said, "These facts should arouse the conscience of the country.  They imperil the right of the people to a free and unpolluted ballot.”  I notice it was the conscience of the country that they summoned.  They apparently did not think it worthwhile to call it to the conscience of the President.

Mr. Roosevelt ahs mastered the power to bestow bread and butter to millions of people or withhold it from them.  He called upon the people specifically in Kentucky, in Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, and Maryland to vote for his selections for the Senate.  At about the same time relief wages in those territories were raised.  Mr. Roosevelt threw in a few bridges and announced a new economic program for the South by government subsidy.  I may not believe all this has any connection with these primaries or this election.  But the question is, do the relief workers believe it?  Of course the people on relief are free to vote the Republican ticket also.  But do they know that?

Nor is this use of bait sectional.  It envelops the whole nation.  This spring when economic improvement was obvious without artificial stimulants and just before this election, this three-billion-dollar pump-priming program was enacted.  The headlines daily flame with the assignment of some pork to every Congressional district.  New Deal candidates proudly announce its arrival to their constituents.  Cities and communities push in Washington to get their feet in the trough.  Hundreds of them justify their manners at the Treasury by the immoral excuse that somebody else will get it.  They organize a lobby to see they get it.  And, worse still, government officials urge them to arrive early before the trough is empty.

Do you wonder that the whole world stands amazed at this supposedly great republic of free men?  Do you wonder that every dictator in Europe uses this exhibit to prove the failure of self-government?

And there are still more ramifications of all this.  Some of our local political organizations, whether Republican or Democrat, have not been perfect in the past.  But we are today confronted with more disheartening growth of high-powered political machines in our cities than ever before in our history.  Kansas City, Saint Louis, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Chicago, and what not.  It may be coincidence that these machines are supporting the New Deal.  It is no coincidence that for six years the patronage and the subsidies of the New Deal have been handled by these political bosses.

We hear much Presidential urging of economic royalists to virtue.  It is probably coincidence that we hear no moral urging of political royalists.

And these are but a few of the black spots.  What of the stench of the primaries in Pennsylvania, New Mexico Indiana and Tennessee?  What of the indictments of high officials in Connecticut?  In New York?  What of the New Deal Governor of Pennsylvania who compels a legislature to suppress a Grand Jury inquiry into charges of corruption against him?

And you know and I know that moral corruption by expenditure of these huge sums of public money penetrates every county and every village.  The indignant citizen used to roll up his sleeves and with his neighbors hope to clean corruption in his own town.  But when it floods from Washington what hope has he to stem the tide?

Do you wonder that our own people lose faith in honesty?  Do they not lose faith in democracy?  Does it not disintegrate the moral standards of our people?

This gigantic expenditure of public money will make its beneficiaries drunk on the basest selfishness and it will make any group drunk with power.

That seems to be one of the attractions of this New Deal Liberal Party.

SAMPLE III

We may take up another spot where a contribution could be made to higher morals.  A Republican Administration in 1925 passed a Corrupt Practices Act prohibiting corporations from contributing to political funds.  That law was founded upon public morals.  It seems that the New Deal considers it a reactionary measure.  In a liberal spirit, something over a year ago Mr. Roosevelt personally autographed several hundred blank sheets of paper.  These autographs turned up in Democratic propaganda books.  These books could be produced for about 50 cents per copy.  On August 12, 1937, the Congress was asked to investigate the selling of these books to corporations for $250 apiece in Mr. Farley's name.  Mr. Farley is appointed by and responsible to Mr. Roosevelt.  Perhaps those corporations were collecting autographs.  But Mr. Roosevelt's autograph can be bought in the bookshops for 95 percent less than $250.  But no doubt the corporations needed autographed special editions of this book.  And for the good of these corporations it was decided they needed not one autograph each but even ten or twenty.  They no doubt could learn from it how to make nails or cement.  Possibly it provides sedative reading between sessions with the Labor Board.

In asking for an investigation, a mass of affidavits, original letters, and photo static copies of correspondence and other evidence was laid before the House of Representatives.  These proved that Mr. Farley's agents had sold these books to wealthy corporations for party funds under thinly disguised threats and thinly disguised promises.  After the incessant and lofty urging to virtue which the corporations have received this must have been a bump.  It was at least a moral violation of the spirit of the Corrupt Practices Act.  Mr. Roosevelt's Attorney-General said it was perfectly legal.  No investigation could be had.

Later on, a list of hundreds of corporations to which these books had been sold was exposed in the press.  Many of them wee firms having business with the government.  If Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Farley were not aware of the use of Mr. Roosevelt's signature and the methods by which it was being sold at $250 a time, why did they not a least express indignation?  Why did they not return the money?

And this immorality does not end with government officials.  These are two parties to these transactions.  There were some men of moral stamina who refused to buy.  Their corporate morals were higher than the government's.  But does this not show a breakdown, under the pressure of our government, of the moral stamina in the men who bought these books under these circumstances.

When the youth of this country see these things done, can we wonder they become cynical and scoff at all idealism?

SAMPLE IV

There is another department of current government morals. That has to do with financial honor in government business.  We can select from a wide display of samples.

In the campaign of 1932 from information obviously since corroborated I challenged Mr. Roosevelt's intention to tinker with the currency.  He denied such an idea indignantly as immoral, and he assured the country that the contract (that is the obligation written on government currency and bonds to pay in gold of present weight and fineness) was more than a contract -- it was a covenant.  But to make us really feel uncomfortable Mr. Roosevelt asked Senator Glass also to make a reply to my charges.  The Senator's reputation for veracity was impregnable.  The Senator did the job with his unsurpassed vocabulary.  But the Senator is an honest man.  Let me quote from his speech only seven months later.  After indicating his regret at ever having delivered that first speech, he continued:  "... To me the suggestion that we may devalue the gold dollar 50 percent means national repudiation.  To me it means dishonor.  In my conception of it, it is immoral.  All the legalistic arguments ... have not dislodged from my mind the irrevocable conviction that it is immoral, and that it means not only contravention of my party's platform . . . but the promises of party spokesmen during the campaign....”

And the New Deal passed a law preventing the citizen from access to the courts for justice and redress.

That was the beginning of New Deal standards in Financial Morals.  It has not been the end.

We may take a more recent sample.  Most of us favor old age pensions.  We helped establish them in the states before the New Deal was born.  We do not criticize that purpose of the Social Security Act.  That Act, however, developed other purposes.  The country was told it was a system of contributory old age insurance.  It has turned out to be concealed taxation of the poorest of our people.  It is said the collections are paid into a reserve fund.  The collections last year were used for current expenditures of the government.  You will have to be taxed over again to make it good.  That scheme also obscures the real deficit and fools the people into thinking that their budget is nearer to being balanced.

To prove my language is moderate, let me quote some phrases from an editorial in the Democratic New York Times of about a month ago.  The Times supported Mr. Roosevelt's election in 1932 and 1936.  They call it "pious fraud,” "a fraud and a delusion,” "not a reserve in the real sense of the word,” "already been spent,” "funds will have to be raised all over again by new taxation,” "this hocus-pocus.”

It is an intricate piece of morals.  I am reminded of a postmaster who got in the habit of taking the cash from the till and putting in his I.O.U.  The Postal Inspectors caught up with him and he received five years.  In his application for pardon his friends urged strongly that he was a rigidly honest man, and as proof of it, they cited the fact that he put his I.O.U. in the till each time he took out the money.

This postmaster's "objectives” were no doubt good.  He was no doubt building up a reserve for his old age.  Certainly his confusion of objectives and morals had a modernistic flavor.

This juggling of government accounts to obscure the realities goes much further.  If you will examine the published statements of the Treasury, you will find that collections from government recoverable loans are being used for current expenses.  And yet they claim that recoverable loans should be deducted from their increase of national debt.  And the old game of obscuring accounts between Regular Expenses and Emergency and Relief goes on and on.  Mr. Roosevelt uses the expression "a layman's budget” every autumn.  It serves effectively for the annual pledge of a balanced budget.  And in the spring it serves to explain the deficit.  Apparently in these days a pledge in the fall becomes an objective in the spring.  And that postpones the feelings of the taxpayer.

There is one certainty about this "layman's budget.”  The layman is a person who is ignorant of a science.  But in this case the bill may teach him something.

I delivered a whole address on samples of this particular form of government by deception two years ago.  It is still unanswered.

SAMPLE V

There is another large department of New Deal morals that we may also explore.  We hear much of social conscience and social justice these days.  That is public conscience.  I rejoice in their continued rise and understanding.  Public conscience is only the aggregate of personal conscience of the mass of the people.  But public conscience will wilt away unless there be the still small voice of personal conscience.  For thence spring good faith, honor, and personal integrity.  Here rest intellectual honesty and justice itself.  Where personal conscience dies there is no freedom for there is no justice.  As personal conscience dies, social conscience becomes but a stepping-stone of personal power.

I have recently visited many countries of totalitarian government—dictatorships, Fascists, Socialists, or Nazis.  Their slogans are social conscience and social justice.  But their outstanding characteristic is degradation of personal conscience.

As an example of personal conscience, we might examine the reasons given and the methods used by Mr. Roosevelt in his attempt to pack the Supreme Court.  I am not going to enter into the demerits of packing the Court.  I am concerned with the moral processes displayed in explaining the reasons for it to the country.

Urbanity of debate limits my use of the English language.  I shall therefore quote wholly from those who have supported Mr. Roosevelt.  I shall not tire you with long quotations.  I will merely mention some of the hard words they use.

Mr. Walter Lippmann's expressions include "trick,” "concealed his purposes,” "lack of good faith,” "lawless legality,” "vicious legalism,” "use the letter of the law to violate the spirit,” "degrading,” "reactionary,” "misleading,” "impairs the dignity of his office,” "injure the moral foundations of the Republic.”

The Democratic New York Times uses the words, "political sharp practice,” "indirectness,” "adroitness.”

The Democratic Baltimore Sun says "disingenuous,” "devious,” "deceptive,” "an intent to deceive.”

The Democratic Richmond Times-Dispatch says "lack of frankness.”

The Democratic New York World-Telegram uses "too clever.”  Its correspondent says "trying to deceive.”

Democratic Senators used about al the other anti-hypocritical phrases, "reasons that obscured its real purpose,” "concealed aims,” "unmoral reasons,” "camouflage,” "hypocrisy,” and a lot of even harder words.  But such friendly sentiments lead to purges.

I could continue indefinitely these phrases from pained Democratic supporters, who are now condemned to outer darkness.  But I merely wish to illustrate what I mean when I talk of intellectual integrity in government.

SAMPLE VI

We may sample still another area of morals where grows the fruit of Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal Party.  National conscience has hitherto embraced the notion of fidelity to truth in government.

It never has taken much effort or literary skill to tell the truth about what goes on in government.  Yet this administration has installed some hundreds of skilled propagandists.  The deluge of free mail sent out by the Government Departments in 1937 would have required $34,000,000 in postage if they paid it.  In the last year of my Administration it was $9,000,000.  That increase by nearly four hundred percent does not include Congressional mail either.   Surely it now takes a powerful effort to tell the truth.  The increase is not devoted to unfavorable news about government activities.

But beyond all this is the radio.  Every hour of the day somewhere in the country some person is painting the glories of this abundant life, or to use the more recent term, "our objectives.”

The whole of this propaganda is impregnated with suppression of fact, the distortion of statistics, the creation of misleading slogans, the building of prejudice or hate.

The Democratic New York World-Telegram estimates the cost of these propaganda officials at over twenty million dollars a year.

You cannot have government by public opinion when opinion of the people is manufactured by paid press agents of the government.

The first weapon of dictatorship is organized propaganda.  A dozen democracies in Europe have been destroyed by mass persuasion and the creation of mass prejudice.  That is the stuff that dictators grow from.  It is the sustenance they live by.  It is the stuff the New Deal lives by.

Every dictator in Europe has proved that by propaganda you can fool enough of the people all the time.

One play in the routine game of propaganda is to steal righteous phrases and devote them to evil doing.  Thus we have Good Neighbors and Social Security, National Planning, Reform and More Abundant Life.  Another department is to attach repulsive phrases to your opponents.  Thus we get Economic Royalists, Tories, Reactionaries, Feudalists, Wild Men and Copperheads, and Purge.

SAMPLE VII

And there are the moral aspects of stirring ill will, conflict and hate.  Class hate is the rock upon which every republic has been wrecked.  And this is the most classless nation yet born.  And hate is preached from the White House for the first time.  I shall not go further into it than to say it has set worker against employer, employer against worker, worker against worker.  And I give you a statistic of only one of its consequences.  In the three years of depression stress before the New Deal, the man-days lost by strikes and lockouts averaged five million per year.  In the five years of the New Deal, they have averaged eighteen million per year.  That is an increase of 350 percent.  Is that building good will and co-operation?

SAMPLE VIII

Mr. Roosevelt invites the American people to join his New Deal Party which he calls Liberal.  We can explore whether it is a party of liberalism and present at the same time a sample of hypocrisy and mass propaganda by government.

The true Liberal school of thought recognizes the purpose of liberalism as more liberty and the advancement of political morals.  Are these exhibits of political morals evidences of liberalism?  One of the first liberal parties in the world was formed to fight political debauchery.  There are other parts of the New Deal program that would choke any definition of liberalism.

Many of Mr. Roosevelt's objectives are hoary with reaction.  They include the destruction of the independence of the judiciary.  That dates with Charles I.  They include a new and avowed campaign to destroy the independence of the legislative arm.  That dates with George III.  It involves a centralization of government which invades the independence of local government.  That is one of Mr. Hitler's successful ideas.

This devaluation of currency is a trick of Roman Emperors.  They were not known to be liberals.  These deficit financings are as old as the French Kings.  It may go back to Babylon. You might look up the inscription at the Feast of Belshazzar.

Mr. Roosevelt himself in discussing my increase of the debt burdens on the taxpayer of about one billion (not five billion as he implied) said that was the rock upon which liberal governments were wrecked.  Surely twenty billions increase in debt is a bump to liberalism.

Are these Socialist enterprises of our government liberalism?  Is this Nazi dictation to labor, farmers, and business liberalism? 

If this sort of stuff is liberal, then George III, Hitler, Stalin, and Boss Tweed are liberals.

Whatever the merits or demerits of such objectives may be, it is immoral to represent them as liberalism.  Liberals have fought these things for centuries.  What president Roosevelt is leading is not liberalism.  Instead of bringing the past up to the present he is bringing the present back to the past.

These are the paving stones of the dangerous road which has wrecked liberal democracies all over the world.

Mr. Roosevelt denounces and accuses all of us who do not believe in these methods and these actions as conservatives.  If being conservative on dragging America into the morass of political immorality or into the Dead Sea of reaction is Conservatism then I cheerfully join that party.  And that party will yet become the hope of American life.

Whatever name we may be called, we shall hold high that lamp of morals as the guide to the American people.

But we should worry less over what is a liberal than what is honest.  That is the very headlight of true Liberalism in this dark world.

And if these successful policies for a free country why have 11,000,000 unemployed?

CONCLUSION

Our opponents pugnaciously demand constructive alternatives with our criticisms.  I have never made an address in debate on public questions without offering a positive and constructive alternative.  I do so most cheerfully upon this subject tonight.

First.  Be honest.  Integrity lives not alone in the pocket.  It lives also in the mind.

Second.  Re-establish morals as the first objective of government.  Give the nation leadership in moral regeneration as the road to national security.  Greed and hate can be more easily cured by moral standards than by policemen.  The people take their moral tone from those who occupy high office.

Third.  Return the administration of Relief to non-partisan local committees even if the Federal government pays 95 percent of their expenditure.  That will stop its political prostitution.  It will better serve the destitute.

Fourth.  Demand the whole patronage system be abolished.  Demand that Congress put every single official except a few at the top under Civil Service Merit System.  Demand that every single appointee during the past six years be required to take merit examinations open to any competitor.

Fifth.  Amend the Corrupt Practices Act to provide instant dismissal and jail for any of these job holders who speaks out loud on politics, and take the enforcement out of partisan hands.

Sixth.  Repudiate the whole idea that the end or the "objective” justifies the means.  Every one of these samples I have cited is the exact practice of this grim doctrine.  That doctrine is a violation of the whole Christian ethics.  It is the philosophy of all dictatorship.

In conclusion may I say again that the fountains of justice alone spring from truth and honesty.  There is no double standard of morals, one in public and one in private life.  Self-government in people decays when moral standards in the people fail.  Moral standards in the people are sullied when moral leadership in government fails.  It is alone the spirit of morals that can reconcile order and freedom.  A people corrupted by their government cannot remain a free people.

These are shifting times and confusion of allegiance to principles.  But there are lights upon the horizon. There is a moral purpose in the universe.  The yearning of men for freedom is not dead.  Those are the roads over which the American people can be led from this wilderness.