The Moral Basis of Democracy by Eleanor Roosevelt

Author:Eleanor Roosevelt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-05-26T19:45:24+00:00

4.

What are our problems today?

I have reviewed the past and pointed out the association of a Christ-like life to the Democratic ideal of government, inaugurated to produce a Democratic way of life.

Now, let us look at our country as it is today and see if, from this examination, we can get a better understanding of some of our problems, and some of the decisions which we have got to make in the near future.

First of all we are a great nation of 130,000,000 people. We cover about three million, seven hundred thousand square miles, including our outlying dependencies such as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. Our people stem from every nation in the world. We include Orientals, Negroes, Europeans, Latin-Americans. We are in truth the melting pot of the world. Our solidarity and unity can never be a geographical unity or a racial unity. It must be a unity growing out of a common idea and a devotion to that idea.

Our national income last year, 1939, was $69,378,000,000. It went down as low as $40,074,000,000 in 1932 in contrast with the peak in 1929, which was $82,885,000,000.

We are slowly climbing out of the economic morass we fell into, but so long as we have the number of unemployed on our hands which we have today, we can be sure that our economic troubles are not over and that we have not found the permanent solution to our problem.

There is going to be almost an entire continent of vast natural resources under the direction of an opposing philosophy to ours, and an opposing economic system. Either we must make our economic system work to the satisfaction of all of our people, or we are going to find it extremely difficult to compete against the one which will be set up on the Continent of Europe.

We hear a good deal of loose talk about going to war. As a matter of fact we are already in a war—an economic war and a war of philosophies. We are opposing a force which, under the rule of one man, completely organizes all business and all individuals and takes no chances except with such uncontrollable phenomena as weather, fire, flood or earthquake. This one man in Europe has no limit on what he can spend for the things he desires to bring about. If he wants quantities of armament, he simply goes ahead and has quantities of armaments. His nation has functioned on an internal currency. When he has need for things from outside, he has obtained them by barter of his manufactured goods or by simply taking the gold which he needed to buy goods from other nations, from those who happened to have it in his own country or from some other country that he decided to take over.

His people receive the wages he decrees, they work the hours he decrees, they wear the clothes he allows them to wear, they eat the food he allows them to have. They

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