Remarks at Grand Coulee Dam.

Coming back to Grand Coulee after three years, I am made very happy by the wonderful progress that I have seen. And I cannot help feeling that everybody who has had anything to do with the building of this great dam is going to be made happy all the rest of his life. Some day we will have a "Grand Coulee Association" for those people who had something to do with this construction; and membership in that Association will be like a badge of honor, because we are building here something that is going to do a great amount of good for this Nation through all the years to come.

My head is full of figures and the easiest way to describe those figures is to say that this is the largest structure, so far as anybody knows, that has ever been undertaken by man in one place. Superlatives do not count for anything because it is so much bigger than anything ever tried before that there is no comparison.

We look forward not only to the great good this will do in the development of power but also in the development of thousands of homes, the bringing in of millions of acres of new land for future Americans.

I think in the State of Washington there is a splendid understanding of one of the objectives in the development of these acres that are going to be irrigated. There are thousands of families in this country in the Middle West, in the Plains area, who are not making good because they are trying to farm on poor land. I look forward to the day when this valley, this basin, is opened up, giving the first opportunity to these American families who need some good farm land in place of their present farms. They are a splendid crowd of people, and it is up to us, as a Nation, to help them to live better than they are living now.

There is another phase that I was thinking about this morning. When the dam is completed and the pool is filled, we shall have a lake 155 miles long running all the way to Canada. You young people especially are going to live to see the day ,when thousands and thousands of people are going to use this great lake both for transportation purposes and for pleasure purposes. There will be sail boats and motor boats and steamship lines running from here to the northern border of the United States and into Canada.

It is a great project—something that appeals to the imagination of the whole country. There is just one other word that is worth saying from the national point of view. We think of this as something that is benefiting this part of the country primarily, giving employment to a great many people in this neighborhood. But we must also remember that one half of the total cost of this dam is paid to the factories east of the Mississippi River. In other words, it is putting to work in the steel centers and other great manufacturing centers of the east thousands of people in making the materials that go into the dam. So, in a very correct sense, it is a national undertaking and doing a national good.

I am always glad to see a project in the construction stage because when it is finished very few people will realize—they won't be able to visualize—all the difficult work in the actual construction. I hope to come back here in another two or three years and see this dam pretty nearly completed. When that time comes, I think we had better, all of us, have a reunion of rejoicing.