Remarks to the Staff of the U.S. Embassy and the American Community in New Delhi.

Mr. Ambassador and Ladies and Gentlemen:

For the last few days I have been traveling on a jet airplane. I have found that you have to adjust your schedule, even on an airplane, for the simple reason you get everywhere so rapidly that after you have allowed time for a breakfast or a lunch with a little nap, you have found that the work you were supposed to do has gone by the board and you have landed. The Ambassador does a tittle bit better than that, he takes you back to Italy from here in a matter of seconds. (Laughter)

But on this trip I have been talking a lot about America's deep desire for peace, and I know that the peoples of all nations feel exactly as the people of America do. I have traveled in many countries of the world and I have never yet found a people that were belligerent, I know of no men that just long for the battlefield and I know of no women who want to see their men, their sons and their husbands, their sweethearts or their fathers, on the battlefield.

So, as far as the longing and aspirations of peoples are involved, we know we are one.

But governments have a habit of getting into the way of the sentiments and the feelings of people. It's the governments that conduct propaganda, that put out what they call information--and I am not so sure it always is--people that create problems and then at least say they are attempting to solve them.

Now our problem is how do we get across from people to people, so that we can each try to fulfill our own destinies according to the methods of our own choosing?

Now I think this is one of the problems and the jobs that people like yourselves help to perform. Political leaders--sometimes they like to call themselves statesmen--are apt to have to deal in generalizations. But you, each of you, with the understanding you display toward another, whether he be of another race or another religion, or different from you in his ideals, but no matter how much this individual may differ, if you are working together and you can understand him and you become friends, you are doing some of the practical work that statesmen and political politicians are talking about.

The courtesies that you show to a visitor, no matter how meanly he is dressed or what kind of work he does, when you can show the natural, inborn courtesy and hospitality that is expected of one of God's creatures, because he is talking to another one, that is helping.

This of course is a very simple, homely example. In all of the hours of our daily lives, you people have an unusual opportunity to do this. Of course, the example you show here, as you work among yourselves, in itself is helpful. But as you go further afield, in your clubs, in your restaurants, and your places of recreation and places of work--the more that the American Embassy, whether its employees are Americans or Indians, the more that the American Embassy gets a name for being understanding and sympathetic, this is the stuff of which finally peace will be made. It is not going to be made by two or three people sitting in something that is called a summit, and after exchanging a lot of views that rarely agree, and probably are not pertinent to the subject particularly, anyway; you are not going to get peace that way. This is going to be people that do people talking to people.

So I say to you that I believe you are not only having the opportunity to do something that for yourselves would be satisfying, in the sense that for your families, for your country, and for your world community, you are really doing something valuable, but it is the kind of thing that the whole world must be doing, if we are going to have the peace that we seek, a peace with justice and of durability.

And when I take a look at the Cub Scouts and children of that age, and I stop to think what will be the year, what will be the year on the calendar, when they are my age--say they are 9 now and add 60 years to that, that is two thousand and nineteen--what is that world going to be then? What are we teaching these little fellows and girls--young Americans and young Indians--how to do these things better than we have done them? Because if we don't do it, by that time, two thousand and nineteen, then indeed this poor old world, I think, will be in a sick state.

But the point is, if we do our work well, they will do theirs better-and we will have the kind of earth that is moving ahead, with a greater measure of happiness for all people, a greater satisfaction in the work we ourselves have done.

So as I say, when I see this kind of crowd, I think of your opportunity to do practical work, where I go around just talking too much sometimes. You don't. You are doing work that is valuable.

The people to people is what will save the world.

Thank you very much--and goodbye and good luck.