Remarks to the International Air Cadet Exchange Group.

IT IS REALLY a privilege to welcome here to our Nation's Capital and to the White House grounds all of you Civil Air Patrol Cadets from so many different countries.

Nowadays, every time you hear about aviation, we are never content to say what is happening, it's always what is going to happen next year. And we talk in terms of how soon we are going to circle the globe in four hours or at least the speed of the sun. And we also talk about the shrinking of the earth and all that sort of thing that it becomes just a part of the speech that somebody must always make, if he talks to you at all on this subject.

One thing that strikes me is this: the only reason for speed is so you can stay somewhere longer--after you get there. If it takes you five days to go from here to Canada and you have only a week's vacation, you are not going to stay there very long, but if you get there in an hour, then you can stay the whole week.

Now I want to talk for just a minute about what you do when you get there. I can't imagine anything better for the whole world, and particularly for all of you people who by your calling you seem to be now choosing, than to take advantage of every opportunity you have to visit another country--indeed, possibly other parts of your own countries. But certainly other countries, to learn what people are doing, what they are thinking and how that thinking and what they are doing affects you in your own country. That seems to me to be even more important than merely getting there so terribly fast.

But if going faster gets you to stay longer, that is all to the good. Every time that you go into another country and you go into a family and you see what their thinking is by intimate conversations with them--whether they really want to be peaceful whether they want to be considerate-whether they want to live in decency with others--that is all to the good. Because too many of us think that if you are not from the country from which I come why then you must have some very bad habits, to say nothing of possible horns and a tail. But as we know each other better, we have got something to take hold of and something that we can do to help spread the understanding of humankind's real brotherhood.

Nothing today is more important than the advancement of a stable peace, a peace with justice. Nobody is going to have a better opportunity to put his shoulder to that work than you people right here.

First, you are young. And you have got seventy years or more of that kind of opportunity ahead. People of my age have a very few years of opportunity. And the things that are going to happen during that period are going to be possibly more marvelous than even in the last seventy years. And goodness knows, they have been startling enough to us.

Each of you will have that, to my mind, as his greatest opportunity to help this poor old world of ours, which seems to have so much of mutual ignorance, misunderstanding, and far too much of mutual prejudice.

If you can do that, no matter what work you do, whether you become an air chief marshal or a general of all the air forces, or anything else, if you can do that, you will be doing the most useful thing I can think of for this coming half-century.

So, as I welcome you here I say, first, I hope you are having a good time, because if you are having a good time, that means that you have learned a few things about this country you like, and therefore, you will carry them back with you. That will please us, of course.

I hope you will have a good time and enjoy yourselves, learning something, and going back with the feeling that you have got something more to contribute to the world society now than when you first came.

God bless all of you. Good luck to all of you. I'll be seeing you.