Remarks to Members of the Illinois Trade Mission to Europe.

Governor, Senator Dirksen :

I am glad to welcome the citizens of Illinois, as well as the businessmen, as well as the financiers. It is hard to tell from up here which is which, but some look more prosperous than others.

We are glad you are going on this trip. I think that most people looking at the map would assume that Illinois is a State in the center of the country, and without an outward looking view of the world, but with the St. Lawrence Seaway, with the tremendous agricultural exports, manufacturing exports, the combination of which, as the Governor said, puts you at the top, I want to say that I think you perform a real national service in going abroad. This is a matter of the greatest national significance to us.

Our balance of payments, the necessity for us to earn enough abroad to sustain our defense commitments around the globe, directly affects the national security of the United States. If we could increase our exports by 10 percent, we would have solved our balance of payments problem. That should be possible for a country as enterprising as the American people. The difficulty has been, of course, that our market here has been so expansive, but what for other countries would have been very essential, and therefore encouraged, has for us been marginal. Now it is essential for us. So if you can find new markets, if you can persuade others to come to the United States--we lose in our balance of payments every year $1,800 million on tourists alone; if we could get as many people to come here and spend the same money that our peripatetic, ubiquitous Americans spend, Senator, traveling around--if we could get them, we could solve our balance of payments problem.

So this is worth doing. This is very valuable for our country, and I hope that it will encourage other States to do the same. We must be--however happy we are at home, we must look abroad. Every dollar we can earn, that you can make, will go to increasing the security of our country.

We keep a million men overseas, and it costs us a good deal in our balance of payments, $2 1/2 billion. So we have to earn it and you are the people who have to earn it; the National Government cannot.

So I appreciate your coming here, and I think it is appropriate that this trip have a send-off here from the White House and the Capital, because you are going not only on your own business, but on the Nation's business.

Thank you.