About Search. I am glad to be in New EnglandβNew England from which have come most of my forebears. In recent weeks I have traveled through a great part of the United States. I have spoken about farming and mining and livestock, about business big and little, about the wage earner, about the national debt, about drought and flood, about work for the needy unemployed and about securityβ security for our people and for their homes.
I have found a Nation more greatly prosperous, more definitely on the highway to complete recovery than at any time in the past seven years.
I have seen the record of what we have done in the faces of the people I have met. We have banished Old Man Gloom. It has taken only one day of driving through Rhode Island and Massachusetts to prove to me that New England is in step and on the march with the rest of the Nation. I have seen things today even more welcome to me than your lovely autumn foliage. I have seen the smoke from factories which three and a half years ago were smokeless.
I have heard the sound of mills which three and a half years ago were silent. I have seen men at work who three and a half years ago were jobless. I have seen women and children who, after long years of fear, have begun to live and hope again.
Three and a half years ago we declared war on the depression. You and I know today that that war is being won. But now comes that familiar figureβthe well-upholstered hindsight critic. He tells us that our strategy was wrong, that the cost was too great, that something else won the war. That is an argument as old as the remorse of those who had their chance and muffed it. It is as recent as the claims of those who say that they could have done better. Almost everybody thought that it was Marshal Joffre who had won it.
