Remarks to the American Field Service Students.

WELL, it is certainly a great privilege to be with this group for a few moments.

The first time I met with visitors to our country, brought here under the auspices of the American field Service, was in 1948. I recall I met them on the steps of Columbia University where I was then President. I think there were about 30 or 40.

Last year there were something over 700 of you here. I recall that then I expressed the hope that you would become to the number of something over ten thousand. Now I hear you have gone beyond one thousand, and that next year 1170 are assigned to come to this country and stay for the year.

This is the kind of progress that warms my heart. I believe as you young people come here--as you can live in the homes of Americans across this land and go with them to their schools--you are taking back to your countries a better understanding of yourselves, of this country, and of your own country than you ever before had.

This is part of what I like to call people-to-people campaigns to wage the peace, because it is in the constant mingling with others that we learn that others have ideals that are just as high, standards just as excellent as those standards and those ideals of our own.

This country wants, above all other things, a just peace. We believe in the rights of small peoples. We believe in the principle that governments are properly established only when it is with the consent of the governed. And these principles, we think, are as wide as the human race. We believe that people feel them definitely in their hearts even though they have not always been taught these ideals and these principles in their schools and in their homes.

If we do believe those things, then your country has just as great concern for the freedom of mine as this country has for you--for each of you. So we are bound together by a great common respect for values that many of us in many countries have proved time and again are valued by men even above life itself.

This is the kind of thing--this kind of relationship, this kinship among us--that is strengthened by your coming here.

Your President has just told me that at the same time you are coming here, something on the order of 800 young Americans are sent abroad to the same countries and at the same time that you people are here. This kind of exchange, as it grows and grows, will have a better and better effect on advancing the peace of the world, of giving greater promise to each of us, young and old, to live fuller and better lives, free of the burdens of armaments, free from the fears of attack, living together in the confidence that humans can trust and believe in other humans.

As you come here and go home, I believe you are advancing these beliefs, these purposes, this hope for the world.

So to each of you I say welcome to this country--although I realize that is a little late after you have been here a year. But at the same time, I say to you, Godspeed as you go back to your own country. Good luck-long life and happiness to each of you--and may you always be true to the spirit of inquiry after truth that you have shown in coming here to this country to see what it is or what it believes and what it hopes for.

So I say Goodbye with a heart full of best wishes to every single one of you. Goodbye and Good Luck.