million dollars a year in interest alone? No. And let it be
recorded that the British bankers helped. Is it not a fact that
ever since the year 1909, Great Britain in many ways has advanced
further along lines of social security than the United States? Is
it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis
of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain
than in the United States? It is perhaps not strange that the
conservative British press has told us with pardonable irony that
much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with
English reforms that go back ten years or more.

Nearly all Americans are sensible and calm people. We do not get
greatly excited nor is our peace of mind disturbed, whether we be
businessmen or workers or farmers, by awesome pronouncements
concerning the unconstitutionality of some of our measures of
recovery and relief and reform. We are not frightened by
reactionary lawyers or political editors. All of these cries have
been heard before. More than twenty years ago, when Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were attempting to correct abuses in
our national life, the great Chief Justice White said:

"There is great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant
habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of
referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of
preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression
that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being
the broad highway through which alone true progress may be
enjoyed."

In our efforts for recovery we have avoided on the one hand the