Remarks at Boise, Idaho.

Governor Clark; and I am going to say what Senator Borah said, "Friends and neighbors":

I shall never forget this morning. When I look back on today's visit to Boise, I shall think chiefly of two things, first your beautiful, tree-lined streets and, secondly, your children.

And I take it, being a Roosevelt, that you are following the Rooseveltian creed, and that the population is not going to die out.

There is something about children and trees that makes me think of permanence and the future. It is not by any means the sole task of the Presidency to think about the present. One of the chief obligations of the Presidency is to think about the future. We have been, in our one hundred and fifty years of constitutional existence, a wasteful nation, a nation that has wasted its natural resources and, very often, wasted its human resources.

One reason why a President of the United States ought to travel throughout the country and become familiar with every State is that he has a great obligation to think about the days when he will no longer be President, to think about the next generation and the generation after that.

That is one reason why I am particularly glad on this trip to see a part of Idaho which I have never seen before. I had travelled through the eastern part of the State and the northern part of the State and now I am seeing something new, something that makes me very proud of this part of the country.

And in these travels I am not just thinking of the- what shall I call them?—the more or less petty problems of the day, the quarrels, the disputes of the moment. I am trying to think about the bigger objectives of American life, to think about planning.

I am trying to think about how we are going to make a better America for those children that I passed this morning. I am trying to think about the conservation of our water resources, to think about a greater prosperity for agriculture, to think about the saving of our timber, to think about a better coordination of our industrial activities, about a better distribution of control over these industrial activities, and to think about the influence that the United States can have on the rest of the world in behalf of peace.

I wish I could physically take the time to spend more days and more weeks going around the country. There was an old mythological character by the name of Antaeus, who was supposed, every time his foot touched the ground, to redouble his strength. When I go about the country after long weeks and months tied up in Washington, which, incidentally, is one of the narrowest places in the world, I feel that I regain strength by just meeting the American people.