of economic advance and social welfare Through exchange fellowships and professor ships, the loan of experts, special training op portunities for technicians and interns, the cultural-relations program should facilitate co operative action in the economic and social field, Social-security legislation may be made more effective, programs of social welfare may be for warded by assistance in the training of adequate personnel, and the exchange of ideas and scientific information in books and other publications may be greatly extended.

A major responsibility for leadership and effort to create a healthy, better, peaceable world has now come to this hemisphere. It has come especially to the United States of America. But the United States will always share that responsibility with the other American republics and with Canada. The New World can hope to be more successful in meeting its vital responsibility than the Old only if it has achieved within itself the cooperative order and the common fabric of morality, law, and human aspiration for a better life free from want and fear, which it would seek to realize in the postwar settlement. If the Americas are to provide leadership in the task of building the better world of peace and economic advancement, a world whose foundations will not soon tremble again, whose walls cannot be toppled down, the time is already here for the scholars and thinkers to start to work on the contribution which the American system of cooperative peace developed in this hemisphere can make to the problem of world stability after the struggle.

In an address delivered just a few days before we were attacked by Japan, Assistant Secretary Berle said in words that have tremendously added significance in the light of today's

events:

"The American system is now preserving in the New World the values of civilization which much of the Old World is destroying. It has

hown the way to a unity between free nations. it has shown that without sacrifice of a jot of proud independence great nations can join in common cause. They can do the work of internal improvement. They can carry on the peaceful fabric of commerce. They can create the power which is needed to repel an enemy. If force is needed, they have and can use force. They are a standing answer to the defeatists who say that unity can come only from conquest.

"On November 25 Berlin attempted to set up a fraudulent order based on terror. It went almost unnoticed in the New World; for in the New World there is already a free order which has, in itself, strength of arms and strength of will; strength of justice and strength of economics."

The union of free men in the United States of America made a home for freedom in the world. The union of free countries in the united republics of America-united less by political bond than by the concept and ideology of liberty itself, in the fullest and deepest sense of the term by a cultural relationship-is today the world's assurance that freedom shall not fail.

How Cultural Contacts Are Winning

Accord for the Americas

ADDRESS BY WILLIAM L. SCHURZ1

Acting Assistant Chief of the Division of
Cultural Relations

Department of State

I have been asked to appraise the results of our inter-American cultural-relations program. By our program I do not mean only the official efforts of the State Department in cooperation with the Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs; I mean the activities of all persons, organized or as individuals, official or private, who are engaged in some way in promoting a better understanding with the peoples of the other American republics. It includes hundreds of organizations that range from the great foundations through the large Pan American societies to village study groups. The movement embraces President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull, the junior high school students of Washington, whose "good neighbor" program was broadcast over Station WMAL this afternoon, and the housewives of a rural free delivery route in the Middle West.

It is too early yet to evaluate the accomplishments of a movement that is still young. For this fifth annual Pan American Conference of George Washington's Inter-American Center represents one of the oldest efforts in the field. Moreover, the results of a movement such as this do not lend themselves to quantitative measurement like figures of trade or miles of new road. One cannot say that we

1 Delivered before the fifth annual Pan American Conference of the Inter-American Center, The George Washington University, January 12, 1942; Mr. Schurz was appointed Assistant Chief of the Division on February 16, 1942.

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North Americans and Latin Americans to one another. The few Latin Americans who visited the United States were liable to feel lonely and bewildered.

During that period there was little positive ill-will on either side, but there was a lamentable lack of understanding of each other's way of life that ill became peoples who shared the same hemisphere and ardently desired to live harmoniously with each other. If the turn of world events should take the wrong course, it might be difficult to preserve that harmony unless we came to know one another better in the meantime. Except as the desire to live at peace with one's neighbors is a matter of self-interest, our efforts to remedy that situation have been disinterested. We covet nothing from Latin America but its esteem and its recognition of a common interest in the preservation of the civilization of this hemisphere. We would neither abridge the sovereignty of its states nor impose our own culture on their peoples. Where the benefits of our own experience in meeting certain problems of our national life, whether in the field of education or public health or applied science, might be of use to them in the solution of their own problems, the results of our experience are theirs for the asking. And no conditions are attached to the giving.

One of the principal barriers to a closer cultural rapprochement between the Americas has been differences of language. Until lately, comparatively few people in the United States made an effort to learn Spanish or Portuguese and few Latin Americans undertook to learn English. As a second language both of us studied French, the Latin American much more successfully than we did because of its affinity with his own tongue. Hundreds of thousands of our own fellow citizens are now diligently studying Spanish, and though much less progress has been made with respect to Portuguese, courses in the language of Brazil are being