Remarks to a Group of Argentine Senators.

Secretary Mann and my friends, Members of the Argentine Senate:

I am very glad to welcome you to my home.

I was a Senator once myself. Almost every day I wish I was back there. No one knows better than I that while Presidents make speeches, Senators make laws, and laws make progress, and progress is the world's business.

Argentina and the United States, your country and my country, are partners and are allies in the great adventure of this hemisphere. We are working together to improve the welfare of the people of an entire continent. The Alliance for Progress is not something that can be conducted at arm's length across the desks of bankers or in the offices of technicians; it requires understanding and sympathy and concern between people, and especially among those who conduct the great business of government.

The Alliance for Progress rests on the belief that the most important work must be done in each country by the government and by the citizens of that country. We are going to have a signing ceremony where we will make allocations to many countries of loans for school construction and farmer cooperatives and malaria eradication and rural electrification, but what finally determines how we get along is the understanding and the sympathy and the concern between people themselves.

We know for sure that development and justice cannot be imposed from the outside; it must be imposed from the will and labors of the people inside. We have learned this lesson around the world at great cost. Self-help is not a principle or a moral judgment; it is a must, a condition of progress. There is no other way.

The United States, as you have learned, has many painful problems. Too many of our citizens, over 20 percent, live in poverty. Their abilities are unused and their hopes are unanswered. Too many are held back by the unjust burden of racial discrimination. But I am trying to muster the full energies of my Government and devote them to finding a solution to these problems.

I predict in our time we will wipe out poverty in America. We will give every citizen a chance to become a taxpayer and not a taxeater. We will give every citizen a chance to use the abilities that God gave him. We will eliminate color as an obstacle to a man's hope for a decent life for himself and his family. This will not be done easily or swiftly, but it will be done.

Now, in your country you must work to increase confidence in your economy, to strengthen democratic institutions, to provide jobs for your workers, to give all your people in the slums and in your rural villages a full and fair share in your increasing wealth, so you can be a part of the effort to develop a great society in this hemisphere.

In this way, and with this effort, you will bring your own country closer to its true greatness. You will bring us all closer to the success of the Alliance for Progress. I hope you will bring this message back to Argentina, as you pursue the long and difficult road toward new hope and dignity for all your people.

To the north there stands the United States of America and all of its people. Under the great leadership of Assistant Secretary Mann and the Special Assistant to the president, Tom Mann, in whom this hemisphere has no better friend, we will be strong in friendship, we will be ready to help both with our Government and with our private sector, we will be determined that success shall greet our struggles, and we will take the step that will say to the two-thirds of the teeming masses in the world that our goal is to develop a society in which men will be treated with equality and in which people will share in the fruits that are produced.

I want to thank you for coming to the White House, and tell you while we are greatly concerned with our problems here at home, and there are many, there is not a day passes that I do not see or talk or write to Secretary Mann about what we can do in this hemisphere together to give a freer, a fuller, and a brighter life for all of our people.

So the time to act is now; the moment to counsel is here. I hope that you will return to your homes with the knowledge that somos amigos.