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The United Nations fight for the
Four Freedoms



The Rights of All Men-Everywhere
The four freedoms of common humanity are as much elements
of man's needs as air and sunlight, bread and salt. Deprive him
of all these freedoms and he dies-deprive him of a part of them
and a part of him withers. Give them to him in full and abundant
measure and he will cross the threshold of a new age, the greatest
age of man.
These freedoms are the rights of men of every creed and every
race, wherever they live. This is their heritage, long withheld.
We of the United Nations have the power and the men and the
will at last to assure man's heritage.
The belief in the four freedoms of common humanity—the
belief in man, created free, in the image of God-is the crucial
difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today. In
it lies the absolute unity of our alliance, opposed to the oneness of
the evil we hate. Here is our strength, the source and promise
of victory.
OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION
Washington, D. C.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
2:
The Four Freedoms
Beyond the war lies the peace. Both
sides have sketched the outlines of the
new world toward which they strain.
The leaders of the Axis countries have
published their design for all to read.
They promise a world in which the con-
quered peoples will live out their lives in
the service of their masters.
The United Nations, now engaged in
a common cause, have also published
their design, and have committed certain
common aims to writing. They plan a
world in which men stand straight and
walk free, free not of all human trouble.
but free of the fear of despotic power,
free to develop as individuals, free to con-
duct and shape their affairs. Such a
world has been more dream than reality,
more hope than fact; but it has been the
best hope men have had and the one for
which they have most consistently shown
themselves willing to die.
This free-ness, this liberty, this pre-
cious thing men love and mean to save, is
the good granite ledge on which the
United Nations now propose to raise
their new world after victory. The pur-
pose of this pamphlet is to examine and
define the essential freedoms.
To talk of war aims, shouting over the
din of battle while the planet rocks and
vibrates, may seem futile to some.
Yet
3
the talk must go on among free peoples.
The faith people have in themselves is
what the free have to build upon. Such
faith is basic to them-man's hot belief
in man, a belief which suggests that
human beings are capable of ordering
their affairs. This is a high compliment
paid by man to himself, an evidence or
gesture of self-respect, of stature, of dig-
nity, and of worth, an affidavit of indi-
vidual responsibility.
The freedoms we are fighting for, we
who are free: the freedoms for which the
men and women in the concentration
camps and prisons and in the dark streets
of the subjugated countries wait, are four
in number.
"The first is freedom of speech and
expression everywhere in the world.
"The second is freedom of every person
to worship God in his own way—every-
where in the world.
"The third is freedom from want-
which, translated into world terms,
means economic understandings which
will secure to every nation a healthy
peacetime life for its inhabitants-every-
where in the world.
"The fourth is freedom from fear-
which, translated into world terms,
means a world-wide reduction of arma-
ments to such a point and in such a thor-
ough fashion that no nation will be in a
position to commit an act of physical
aggression against any neighbor—any-
where in the world.'
"1
These freedoms are separate, but not
independent. Each one relies upon all
the others. Each supports the whole,
which is liberty. When one is missing,
all the others are jeopardized. A person
who lives under a tyrant, and has lost
freedom of speech, must necessarily be
tortured by fear. A person who is in
great want is usually also in great fear-
fear of even direr want and greater in-
security. A person denied the right to
worship in his own way has thereby lost
the knack of free speech, for unless he is
free to exercise his religious conscience,
his privilege of free speech (even though
not specifically denied) is meaningless.
A person tortured with fears has lost both
the privilege of free speech and the
strength to supply himself with his needs.
Clearly these four freedoms are as closely
related, as dependent one upon another,
as the four seasons of the natural year,
whose winter snows irrigate the spring,
and whose dead leaves, fermenting, re-
build the soil for summer's yield.
The first two freedoms-freedom of
speech and freedom of religion—are cul-
tural. They are prerogatives of the
thinking man, of the creative and civil-
ized human being. Sometimes, as in the
United States, they are guaranteed by
organic law. They are rather clearly
understood, and the laws protecting them
1 Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Seventy-seventh
Congress, January 6, 1941.
4
are continually being revised and ad-
justed to preserve their basic meaning.
Freedom from fear and from want, on
the other hand, are not part of our cul-
ture but part of our environment—they
concern the facts of our lives rather than
the thoughts of our minds. Men are un-
afraid, or well-fed, or both, according to
the conditions under which they live.
To be free a man must live in a society
which has relieved those curious pres-
sures which conspire to make men slaves:
pressure of a despotic government, pres-
sure of intolerance, pressure of want.
The declaration of the four freedoms,
therefore, is not a promise of a gift which,
under certain conditions, the people will
receive; it is a declaration of a design
which the people themselves may exe-
cute.
Freedom, of whatever sort, is relative.
Nations united by a common effort to
create a better world are obviously not
projecting a Utopia in which nobody
shall want for anything. That is not the
point-nor within the range of human
possibility. What unites them is the pur-
pose to create a world in which no one
need want for the minimum necessities
of an orderly and decent life, for cleanli-
ness, for self-respect and security. It is
an ambitious design, perhaps too ambi-
tious for the cynic or the faithless; but it
is supported by the sure knowledge that
the earth produces abundantly and that
men are already in possession of the tools
which could realize such a purpose if men
chose to use them.

ES
This, then, is a credo to which the
representatives of 28 nations have sub-
scribed-not a promise made by any
group of men to any other group. It is
only the people themselves who can cre-
ate the conditions favoring these essen-
tial freedoms which they are now repur-
chasing in the bazaar of war and paying
for with their lives. Nothing is for sale
at bargain prices, nor will the house be
built in three days with cheap labor.
From a world in ruins there can rise only
a slow, deliberate monument. This time,
conceived by so many peoples of united
purpose, it will rise straight upward and
rest on good support.
Freedom of Speech
To live free a man must speak openly:
gag him and he becomes either servile
or full of cankers. Free government is
then the most realistic kind of govern-
ment for it not only assumes that a man
has something on his mind, but concedes
his right to say it. It permits him to
talk-not without fear of contradiction,
but without fear of punishment.
There can be no people's rule unless
there is talk. Men, it turns out, breathe
through their minds as well as through
their lungs, and there must be a circula-
tion of ideas as well as of air. Since
nothing is likely to be more distasteful to a
man than the opinion of someone who dis-
agrees with him, it does the race credit
that it has so stubbornly defended the
principle of free speech. But if a man
knows anything at all, he knows that that
principle is fundamental in self-govern-
ment, the whole purpose of which is to
reflect and affirm the will of the people.
In America, free speech and a free
5
press were the first things the minds of
the people turned to after the fashioning
of the Constitution. Farsighted men, in
those early days, readily understood that
some sort of protection was necessary.
Thus when the first amendment to the
Constitution was drawn (part of what
the world now knows as the Bill of
Rights), it prohibited the Congress from
making any law which might abridge the
freedom of speech or of the press, or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble
and to petition the Government for a
redress of their grievances.
In the Nazi state, freedom of speech
and expression have been discarded-not
for temporary military expediency, but
as a principle of life. Being contemp-
tuous of the individual, and secretly sus-
picious of him, the German leader has
deprived him of his voice. Ideas are
what tyrants most fear. To set up a
despotic state, the first step is to get rid
of the talkers—the talkers in schools, the
talkers in forums, the talkers in political
rallies and in trade union meetings, the
talkers on the radio and in the newsreels,
and in the barber shops and village
garages. Talk does not fit the Nazi and
the Fascist scheme, where all ideas are,
by the very nature of the political struc-
ture, the property of one man.
Talk is death to tyranny, for it can
easily clarify a political position which
the ruler may prefer to becloud, and it
can expose injustices which he may
choose to obscure.
Our Bill of Rights specifically men-
tioned the press. Today the press is one
6
of many forms of utterance. Talk and
ideas flow in ever-increasing torrents,
through books, magazines, schools, the
radio, the motion picture. The camera
has created a whole new language of
its own.
All these new forms are safeguarded
with the ancient guarantees, but the es-
sential danger of not being allowed to
speak freely remains. Today the privi-
lege is challenged more gravely than ever
before; in the countries dominated by the
Axis books are burned, universities are
shut down, men are put to death for lis-
tening to a radio broadcast. Hitler's
New Order seeks to prove that unity and
efficiency are achieved most readily
among people who are prevented from
reading, thinking, talking, debating.
This new anesthesia is a subtle drug.
Under its quick influence men sleep a
strange sleep.
The right to speak, the right to hear,
the right of access to information carry
with them certain responsibilities. Cer-
tain favorable conditions are necessary
before freedom of speech acquires valid-
ity.
The first condition is that the individ-
ual have something to say. Literacy is
a prerequisite of free speech, and gives it
point. Denied education, denied infor-
mation, suppressed or enslaved, people
grow sluggish; their opinions are hardly
worth the high privilege of release.
Similarly, those who live in terror or in
destitution, even though no specific con-
trol is placed upon their speech, are as
good as gagged.
Another condition necessary for free
speech is that the people have access to
the means of uttering it-to newspapers,
to the radio, the public forum. When
power or capital are concentrated, when
the press is too closely the property of
narrow interests, then freedom suffers.
There is no freedom, either, unless facts
are within reach, unless information is
made available. And a final condition
of free speech is that there be no penalties
attached to the spread of information and
to the expression of opinion, whether
those penalties be applied by the Gov-
ernment or by any private interests
whatsoever.
The operation of a free press and the
free expression of opinion are far from
absolute rights. The laws of libel and
slander set limits on what men may say of
other men. The exigency of war sets
limits on what information may be given
out, lest it give aid and comfort to the
enemy. Good taste sets limits on all
speech.
Freedom of speech, Justice Holmes has
warned, does not grant the right to shout
fire in a crowded theatre. When ideas
become overt acts against peace and
order, then the Government presumes to
interfere with free speech. The burden
of proof, however, is upon those who
would restrict speech-the danger must
be not some vague danger but real and
immediate.
We are not so much concerned with
these inevitable limitations to free speech
as with the delight at the principle in
society and how greatly it has strength-
ened man's spirit, how steadily it has en-
larged his culture and his world. We in
America know what the privilege is be-
cause we have lived with it for a century
and a half. Talk founded the Union,
nurtured it, and preserved it. The dis-
senter, the disbeliever, the crack-pot, the
reformer, those who would pull down as
well as build up-all are free to have
their say.
Talk is our daily fare-the white-
bosomed lecturer regaling the Tuesday
Ladies' Club, the prisoner at the bar testi-
fying in his own behalf, the editorial
writer complaining of civic abuses, the
actor declaiming behind the footlights,
the movie star speaking on the screen, the
librarian dispensing the accumulated talk
of ages, the professor holding forth to his
students, the debating society, the meet-
ing of the aldermen, the minister in the
pulpit, the traveler in the smoking car,
the soap-box orator with his flag and his
bundle of epigrams, the opinions of the
solemn magistrate and the opinions of the
animated mouse-words, ideas, in a
never-ending stream, from the enduring
wisdom of the great and the good to the
puniest thought troubling the feeblest
brain. All are listened to, all add up to
something and we call it the rule of the
people, the people who are free to say the
words.
The United States fights to preserve
this heritage, which is the very essence of
the Four Freedoms. How, unless there
is freedom of speech, can freedom of re-
ligion or freedom from want or freedom
from fear be realized? The enemies of
7
all liberty flourish and grow strong in the
dark of enforced silence.
For the right to be articulate the in-
articulate airman climbs to his fabulous
battleground. For this fight the grim-
lipped soldier; the close-mouthed sailor;
the marine.
Freedom of Religion
That part of man which is called the
spirit and which belongs only to himself
and to his God, is of the very first concern.
in designing a free world. It was not
their stomachs but their immortal souls
which brought the first settlers to Amer-
ica's shores, and they prayed before they
ate. Freedom of conscience, the right to
worship God, is part of our soil and of the
sky above this continent.
Freedom of worship implies that the
individual has a source of moral values
which transcends the immediate necessi-
ties of the community, however impor-
tant these may be. It is one thing to pay
taxes to the state-this men will do; it is
another to submit their consciences to the
state this they politely decline. The
wise community respects this mysterious
quality in the individual, and makes its
plans accordingly.
The democratic guarantee of freedom
of worship is not in the nature of a
grant-it is in the nature of an admission.
It is the state admitting that the spirit
soars in illimitable regions beyond the
collectors of customs. It was Tom Paine,
8
one of the great voices of freedom in early
America, who pointed out that a govern-
ment could no more grant to man the
liberty to worship God than it could grant
to God the liberty of receiving such
worship.
The miracle which democracy has
achieved is that while practicing many
kinds of worship, we nevertheless achieve
social unity and peace. And so we have
the impressive spectacle, which is with us
always here in America, of men attending
many different churches, but the same
town meeting, the same political forum.
Opposed to this democratic conception
of man and of the human spirit is the
totalitarian conception. The Axis pow-
ers pretend that they own all of a man,
including his conscience. It was inevita-
ble that the Nazis should try to deny the
Christian church, because in virtually
every respect its teachings are in opposi-
tion to the Nazi ideal of race supremacy
and of the subordination of the individ-
ual. Christianity could only be an an-
noyance and a threat to Hitler's bid for
power and his contempt for the common
man.
Today the struggle of Man's spirit is
against new and curious shackles. To-
day a new monstrosity has shown itself on
earth, a seven days' wonder, a new child
of tyranny-a political religion in which
the leader of the state becomes, himself,
an object of worship and reverence and
in which the individual becomes a cor-
puscle in the blood of the community,
almost without identity. This Nazi freak
must fail, if only because men are not

ミニミニ
​SABATOA
ミミニ
​clods, because the spirit does live.
In
the design for a new and better world,
religious freedom is a fundamental prop.
We of the nations united in war, among
whom all the great religions are repre-
sented, see a triumphant peace by which
all races will continue the belief in man,
the belief in his elusive and untouchable
spirit, and in the solid worth of human
life.
Freedom From Want
The proposal that want be abolished
from this world would be pretentious, or
even ridiculous, were it not for two im-
portant recent discoveries.
One is the discovery that, beyond any
doubt, men now possess the technical
ability to produce in great abundance
the necessities of daily life-enough for
everyone. This is a revolutionary and
quite unprecedented condition on earth,
which stimulates the imagination and
quickens the blood.
Another is the discovery (or rather the
realization) that the earth is one planet
indivisible-that one man's hunger is
every other man's hunger. We know
now that the world must be looked at
whole if men are to enjoy the fruits they
are now able to produce, and if the in-
habitants of the globe are to survive and
prosper.
Freedom from want, everywhere in
the world, is within the grasp of men.
It has never been quite within their grasp
before. Prosperous times have been en-
joyed in certain regions of the world at
certain periods in history, but local pros-
perity was usually achieved at the ex-
pense of some other region, which was
9
being impoverished, and the spectre of
impending war hung over all. Now, the
industrial changes of the last 150 years
and the new prospect implicit in the
words "United Nations" have given
meaning to the phrase "freedom from
want" and rendered it not only possible
but necessary.
It was in the year 1492 that the earth
became round in the minds of men-al-
though it had been privately globular for
many centuries. Now in the year 1942,
by a coincidence which should fortify
astrologers, the earth's rotundity again
opens new vistas, this time not of fabulous
continents ready to be ransacked, but of
a fabulous world ready to be unified and
restored. War having achieved totality,
against men's wishes but with their full
participation, our great resolve as we go
to battle must now be that the peace shall
be total also. The world is all one today.
No military gesture anywhere on earth,
however trivial, has been without conse-
quence everywhere; and what is true of
the military is true, also, of the economic.
A hungry man in Cambodia is a threat to
the well-fed of Duluth.
People are worried about the period
which will follow this war. Some fear
the peace more than they fear the war.
But the picture is neither hopeless nor
is it black. Already, in this country
and abroad, agencies are at work making
preliminary studies and designing ma-
chinery to stabilize the peacetime world
which will follow the war. They are
preparing to reemploy the returning sol-
dier, to maintain buying power at a high
IO
level, to stand behind industry while it is
changing back to peaceable products, to
guarantee a certain security to the groups
which need such guarantees. The fact
that these plans are being drawn is itself
encouraging, for when trouble is antici-
pated and fairly faced, it is less likely to
ensue.
The tools of production and the skills
which men possess are tremendous in the
present war emergency, and when the
peace comes, the world will contain more
skilled people than ever before in history.
Those who are at work planning broadly
for a better human society propose to
equip this enormous productive man-
power with new ideas to fit new con-
ditions.
The pattern is already beginning to be-
come apparent. Once, the soil was re-
garded as something to use and get the
most from and then abandon. Now it is
something to conserve and replenish.
Once it was enough that a man compete
freely in business, for the greatest possible
personal gain; now his enterprise, still
free, must meet social standards and must
not tend toward concentration of power
unfavorable to the general well-being of
the community. Once, an idle man was
presumed to be a loafer; now it is realized
he may be a victim of circumstances in
which all share, and for which all are
responsible.
The great civilizations of the past were
never free from wide-spread poverty.
Very few of them, and these only during
short periods, produced enough wealth to
make possible a decent living standard for
all their members, even if that wealth had
been equally divided. In the short space
of a few decades we have changed scar-
city to abundance and are now engaged
in the experiment of trying to live with
our new and as yet unmanageable riches.
The problem becomes one not of produc-
tion but of distribution and of consump-
tion; and since buying power must be
earned, freedom from want becomes free-
dom from mass unemployment, plus free-
dom from penury for those individuals
unable to work.
In our United States the Federal Gov-
ernment, being the common meeting
ground of all interests and the final
agency of the people, assumes a certain
responsibility for the solution of economic
problems. This is not a new role for the
Government, which has been engaged
since the earliest days of our history in
devising laws and machinery and tech-
niques for promoting the well-being of
the citizen, whether he was a soldier re-
turning from a war, or a new settler head-
ing west to seek his fortune, or a manufac-
turer looking for a market for his goods,
or a farmer puzzled over a problem in
animal husbandry.
The beginning has been made. The
right to work. The right to fair pay.
The right to adequate food, clothing,
shelter, medical care. The right to se-
curity. The right to live in an atmos-
phere of free enterprise. We state these
things as "rights"-not because man has
any natural right to be nourished and
sheltered, not because the world owes any
man a living, but because unless man suc-
ceeds in filling these primary needs his

HALL
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​II
only development is backward and down-
ward, his only growth malignant, and his
last resource war.
All of these opportunities are not in the
American record yet, and they are not
yet in the world's portfolio in the shape of
blueprints. Much of America and most
of the world are not properly fed, clothed,
housed. But there has never been a
time, since the world began, when the
hope of providing the essentials of life to
every living man and woman and child
has been so good, or when the necessity
has been so great.
It can be done. The wealth exists in
the earth, the power exists in the hills,
men have the tools and the training.
What remains to be seen is whether they
have the wit and the moral character to
work together and to lay aside their per-
sonal greed.
We and our allies are fighting today
not merely to defend an honorable past
and old slogans and faiths, but to con-
struct a still more honorable and reward-
defeat one sort of enemy is capable of
sustaining the effort through the days
that follow. Work, in vast quantity and
in infinite variety, will be waiting to be
done. We will have the capacity to pro-
duce the highest national income ever
known, and the jobs to keep men at work.
Freedom from want is neither a con-
jurer's trick nor a madman's dream.
The earth has never known it, nor any-
thing approaching it. But free men do
not accept the defeatist notion that it
never will. The freeing of all people
from want is a continuing experiment,
the oldest and most absorbing one in the
laboratory, the one that has produced
the strangest gases and the loudest explo-
sions. It is a people's own experiment
and goes on through the courtesy of
chemists and physicists and poets and
technicians and men of strong faith and
unshakable resolve.
ing future. Fighting men, coming back Freedom From Fear
from the war, will not be satisfied with a
mere guarantee of dull security-they
will expect to find useful work and a
vigorous life. Already moves are being
made to meet this inescapable challenge.
The first step, obviously, will be to pre-
vent the sort of slump which has usually
followed a great war.
War is tremend-
ously costly, in terms of money. Billions
are being spent in order that we may win.
The peace, too, will be costly, and noth-
ing is gained by evading the fact. But a
democracy which can organize itself to
I 2
Fear is the inheritance of every animal,
and man is no exception. Our children
fear the tangible dark, and we give them
what reassurance we can, so that they will
grow and develop normally, their minds
free from imaginary terrors.
This re-
assurance, this sense of protection and
security, is an important factor in their
lives.
The new dark which has settled on the
earth with the coming of might and force
and evil has terrified grown men and
women. They fear the dark, fear fire
and the sword; they are tormented by the
dread of evils which are only too real.
They fear the conqueror who places his
shackles on the mind. Above all else
they are tortured by that basic political
fear: fear of domination of themselves
by others others who are stronger,
others who are advancing, others who
have the weapons and are destroying and
burning and pillaging. This is the fear
which haunts millions of men and women
everywhere in the world. It is the fear
of being awakened in the night, with the
rapping on the door.
No structure of peace, no design for a
good world, will have any solidity or
strength or even any meaning unless it
disperses the shadow of this fear and
brings reassurance to men and women,
not only for themselves but for their chil-
dren and their children's children. Ag-
gressive war, sudden armed attack, secret
police, these must be forever circum-
vented. The use of force, historically
the means of settling disputes, must be
made less and less feasible on earth, until
it finally becomes impossible. Even
though the underlying causes which fo-
ment wars may not be immediately eradi-
cated from the earth, the physical act of
war can be prevented when people, by
their ingenuity, their intelligence, their
memory, and their moral nature, choose
to do so. Force can be eliminated as a
means of political action only if it be op-
posed with an equal or greater force-
which is economic and moral and which
is backed by collective police power, so
that in a community of nations no one
nation or group of nations will have the
opportunity to commit acts of aggression
against any neighbor, anywhere in the
world.
The machinery for enforcing peace is
important and indispensable; but even
more important is that there be estab-
lished a moral situation, which will sup-
port and operate this machinery. As the
last war ended, an attempt was made to
construct an orderly world society cap-
able of self-control. It was an idealistic
and revolutionary plan. But like the
first automobile, it moved haltingly and
was more of a novelty than a success.
For a while men's hopes focused on the
plan; but it was never universally ac-
cepted. The faith was not there, nor
the courage.
Today many nations are working to-
gether with unbelievable energy and with
harmony of feeling and interest. They
are united at the moment by the desire
to win battles, but they are also united
by common principles and by a convic-
tion that their people ultimately want the
same thing from life-freedom, peace, se-
curity, the chance to live as individuals.
Such collaboration has its origin in the
democratic spirit, which infects men re-
gardless of latitude or longitude, and it
has been fed by the close association be-
tween nations which are geographically
near neighbors as, for example, the in-
ter-American powers. Canada has been
a good neighbor to the United States for
many years, and the Canadian border,
never fortified, stands today as a symbol
13
of what the world will be when men's
faith becomes great enough and their
heads become hard enough.
Still another answer to fear is found in
the concept of the United Nations. For
the first time in history, twenty-eight na-
tions have been acting together, in the
very midst of a mortal struggle, to set
down the specifications of a peace settle-
ment and the aims of war and post-war
action. Their representatives, meeting
in Washington on New Year's Day, 1942,
signed a historic Declaration by United
Nations, saying:
"The Governments signatory hereto,
"Having subscribed to a common program of
purposes and principles embodied in the Joint
Declaration of the President of the United States
of America and the Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland dated August 14, 1941, known as the
Atlantic Charter,
"Being convinced that complete victory over
their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty,
independence and religious freedom, and to pre-
serve human rights and justice in their own lands
as well as in other lands, and that they are now
engaged in a common struggle against savage.
and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world,
DECLARE:
"(1) Each Government pledges itself to em-
ploy its full resources, military or economic,
against those members of the Tripartite Pact
and its adherents with which such government
is at war.
"(2) Each Government pledges itself to co-
operate with the Governments signatory hereto
and not to make a separate armistice or peace
with the enemies.
"The foregoing declaration may be adhered
to by other nations which are, or which may be,
rendering material assistance and contributions
in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.'
""
The nations signing the Declaration by
United Nations are: The United King-

FILIST
14
dom of Great Britain and Northern Ire-
land, the Union of Soviet Socialist Re-
publics, China, Australia, Belgium, Can-
ada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia,
the Dominican Republic, El Salvador,
Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras,
India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pan-
ama, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia,
and the United States of America. On
June 14, Mexico and the Philippine
Islands adhered to the Declaration by
United Nations.
Can anyone be deaf to the sound of
hope in this assemblage? Men have not
achieved their goal, but at least they
have collectively aspired to it, and have
accepted a responsibility for it which is
continuing and not merely fitful. The
work is to go on.
on. The new building will
indeed be built, whatever its shape, what-
ever its appointments, whatever its
defects.
Those are the goals of the peace and
the hope of the world. But the specific
and immediate problem, the first move to
free people from fear, is to achieve a
peaceable world which has been deprived
of its power to destroy itself. This can
only be accomplished by disarming the
aggressors and keeping them disarmed.
Last time they were disarmed, but they
were not prevented from rearming. This
time they will be disarmed in truth.
It will be remembered that the inquisi-
tive Ben Franklin, testing the lightning
with his kite, found in the storm's noisy
violence the glimmerings of a secret
which later illuminated the world. His
example suggests that good news is some-
times hidden in bad weather. Today, in
the storm which rages across the whole
earth, men are sending up their kites to
the new lightning, to try its possibilities
and to prepare for clearing skies.
The Four Freedoms guide them on.
Freedom of speech and religion, freedom
from want and from fear-these belong
to all the earth and to all men every-
where. Our own country, with its ideas
of equality, is an experiment which has
been conducted against odds and with
much patience and, best of all, with some
success for most people. It has pros-
pered and brought fresh hope to millions
and new good to humanity. Even in the
thick of war the experiment goes ahead
with old values and new forms. Life is
change. The earth shrinks in upon
itself and we adjust to a world in motion,
holding fast to the truth as we know it,
confident that as long as the love of free-
dom shows in the eyes of men, it will show
also in their deeds.
15

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Four Freedoms

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