I can't believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy? The peace cannot include any continued despotism ... Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade.

There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate - that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future - and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that this is not true.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Today the whole world is divided: divided between human slavery and human freedom- between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom, which is the Christian ideal.

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.