Remarks at the Democratic Women's National Council Dinner.

THANK YOU very much. It has been a grand evening, one of the most pleasant I have spent in many a day.

I am instructing the staff to employ the chairman and toastmaster as a professional introducer to go along on the train next time.

Mrs. Truman was exceedingly sorry that she couldn't be present. She rode in an open car in Chicago the night we were there, and it was rather cold and chilly, and she had a cold already, so she got a real one. And Margaret, the doctor and myself have been put to it to keep her in bed, but we have kept her there, and I think she will be all right in a day or two. She is very sorry that she couldn't make it.

It has been a wonderful program. You know, my mother used to sing me to sleep on Camptown Races; and Stephen Foster, in my opinion, is one of the great American folk song writers--he didn't write a single bad one. Everybody is in love with him. My grandmother used to live in the house where he wrote these songs, and she was acquainted with him when she was a very young woman. She was born in 1818.

I enjoyed the music which the orchestra furnished us, particularly that Schubert's Military March, which Margaret used to teach me how to play--I played one end of the duet and she played the other. She was always telling me how to do it--and she does that yet--and so does her mother.

You know, I am happy to be here tonight, because this organization, the Women's Democratic Council, is made up of people who actually do the work in Government. It would be almost--well, it would be an impossibility for anybody to fill a key position in the Government such as Secretary of the Treasury, or Attorney General, or Secretary of Agriculture, or President of the United States, unless he had a loyal and efficient staff.

There has been a great deal of conversation about a successful jaunt which the President took just a few days ago. If that trip was a success, it was due to the fact that the President had the most efficient staff that has ever been gotten together for the purpose.

Nobody can operate unless he has cooperation and loyalty from those who work for him. There is nothing more important than those two words in the carrying on of the Government of the United States.

Now, you hear a great deal of conversation, whenever a politician wants to make a hit out in the sticks, he gets up and talks about the bureaucrats and the unnecessary people on the payroll of the Government. That is demagoguery.

In my opinion, there never was a time in the history of the Government when we have had more loyal and more efficient employees than we have right at this day and time. Nobody is in a position to make that statement more firmly than I am. I spent 10 years in the Senate. I understand Senators. I understand what makes them tick. I understand what they do. When they first come to the Senate, they have 4 years in which to be statesmen. I spent that period myself. Then they have a year in which to be politicians. And one of my good friends from the great State of Washington told me that the last year a Senator had to be a demagogue if he expected to come back to the Senate. I never heard a statement that is truer than that. And 9 times in 10 they don't mean a word they say about the people who are working in the Government. And I am not casting any reflections on the Senate, I am talking about myself, when I was a United States Senator, and I know what I am talking about, as I spent 10 of the best years of my life in the Senate. I enjoyed it. I had a good time.

I was one of those in the Senate who was called a rubber-stamp Senator. Do you know what a rubber-stamp Congressman or Senator is? He is a man who is elected on the platform of the party, and who tries to carry out that platform in cooperation with the President of the United States--that's all he is.

By carrying out my promises in the campaign which I made in 1934, which was founded on the Democratic platform of 1932, I got myself into a whale of a lot of trouble. I don't think any man ever got into more trouble carrying out his promises than I have. I am not sorry for it, however. It is great to be of service to the greatest Republic in the history of the world.

We are, without any braggadocio or any other sort of thing that could be charged to us as blowing our own horns, we are now in the position of the leaders of the free world. We must assume that responsibility. We should have assumed it in 1920. We didn't because we didn't understand what it was all about. It took 30 years and a second war for us to come to our understanding of what our position in the world is supposed to be.

If we carry through the program for world peace and the welfare of the people--the people, not the government--the people of the world, I think we are facing the greatest age in history.

Now, you are doing your part in that. You are making your contribution to our carrying out what I think God Almighty intended us to do 30 years ago. We have got to carry it out, because we have assumed the responsibility. We have got to make the United Nations work. We have got to make the atomic explosion work for peace instead of for destruction.

If we do that--think--think--with what we are faced! I wish I were 30 or 40 years younger--and could see this coming age! I am just as sure as I stand here that the things we have seen in the past will not compare with what we are faced with in the future.

As I have said time and again, I believe that we are going to come out on top, that we are going to come out all right, that the next 30, 40, 50, 60, 100--the next 200 years are going to be the greatest in the history of the world, and it is going to be that way because you now in this crisis are doing your duty.

Thank you very much.