Remarks at the State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebr.

Governor Cochran, Mayor Bryan, my friends of Nebraska:

I am glad to come here, to be here in the presence of so many old friends. It is so long since I have been in this capital city of the State, that this wonderful structure that I face had not then even been started.

I have seen—in fact all the people of America have seen—photographs of this wonderful capitol building. Every one of them ought to come here and see it—a great structure, worthy of a great State.

I am not here to deliver a formal, carefully prepared address to you. I want to talk to you for a few minutes just as one of your fellow Americans who has great privileges. One of the privileges which I have in abundance is that of getting to know the United States. I suppose that I have been not once but a good many times in every State in the Union. One of the great lessons of the last three and a half or four years is the need of our thinking in national terms, because we have come to realize that anything that harms one State harms all the States. And back in the East, back in the great industrial centers, they have at last come to realize that they cannot be prosperous there unless you people are prosperous out here.

That has been one of the cardinal impulses that has directed all of our program during these past three years in Washington —the thought that we had to help everybody and not just a few people here and there. And as I have come west over the railroads, I no longer see the long trains of empty cars on the sidings. I see engines, that had been laid aside in 1929 for lack of use, being brought out of the shops, put on the tracks, and started down the rails with a string of freight cars behind them.

Why is that? It is because the freight cars have something to haul. And the reason the freight cars have something to haul is because people have money to buy things with—that is pretty obvious. The national income of the United States this year will have risen from about thirty-eight billion dollars in 1932 to well over sixty billions in 1936. In other words, it seems to me like a fairly simple mathematical question to put to you. If somebody that you trusted were to come to you and say, "Look here, will you borrow $800 so as to get an increase in your annual income of $2,200?" would you do it or not?

That is what has happened to our national finances. All you have to do is to add a lot of zeros to those figures. We have borrowed a net of eight billion dollars more in these three and a half years, and we have increased the national income over twenty-two billion dollars- and that is a pretty good investment.

You know, during a campaign I always like to have a few days in between trips, so that I can sit quietly for an hour or two or perhaps go to bed and, before I turn out the light, read some of the things that the other fellows are saying.

I got a telegram this morning on the train from a woman in Nebraska who was complaining that people are going up and down through this State, going to farms and going to homes, and saying to the families in those farms and homes: "If this man Roosevelt should go back into the White House, what will he do? Why, he will slap some kind of tax on your home and your farm and take it away from you to pay the national debt."

Now, my friends, I believe in this motto right in front of me on the capitol—"The Salvation of the State is Watchfulness in the Citizens." For the last three and a half years the citizens of this country have developed a watchfulness and an understanding greater than they have ever had before; and because of that they are going to be able to distinguish the true from the false in this election.

Of course most people—I will not say everybody, but give us a few more years and it will be everybody— most people understand that taxes on real estate are levied in great part for the benefit of local government, and in some States in small part for the maintenance of State Government. There never has been, and there never will be, a Federal tax on farms or homes, as long as I have anything to do about it.

Yes, I get a lot of amusement—I was going to say a big kick-out of this campaign.

Somebody, talking about the national farm program of the last three and a half years —which, by the way, is operated in conjunction with the State Governments, the State colleges and the local county committees right down to the individual farmer—said that it was just like an automobile: its model was changed every year.

Well, I accept that simile; it is good. In other words, the automobile, like farming, improves through the years, and the policy relating to the automobile and the policy relating to farming ought to have a new model every year. I want to express to you my belief that the Model-T type of farming may have been all right between 1920 and 1930, but it is out of date today.

Of course, as you know, the Federal Government, working with the local governments, has made possible the saving of homes, and the saving of farms. You know also that the great bulk of all that money that was loaned is going to come back to the Treasury. In the same way because it is all part of the same picture, the money we have loaned to keep the railroads going until the production and consuming power of the country could catch up is also being repaid. The money we loaned to keep the banks open—and, by the way, for the first time in fifty-five years, there has not been for this whole year a national bank failure in all the United States— that money, that saved the banks, is coming back to the Treasury.

Some money was not merely loaned. That is true. Some money was spent to keep a good many million families from starving in these three and a half years—to give people work instead of a dole. I believe in work and not in a dole. That money was spent in a good cause, and, as one of my high-class business friends from New York remarked to me the other day, "If there were as little waste by corporations in spending a sum like that as there has been in the Federal expenditure of that money, there would be fewer bankrupt corporations in the United States today."

It comes back to your motto: "The Salvation of the State is Watchfulness in the Citizens." Read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest—and "inwardly digest" means separating the wheat from the chaff of a national campaign.

I believe—I know—that the American people know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that is why I am confident of their verdict on the third day of November.