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Show On Being Vigilant lgT By GEORGE S.BENSON ffO 1 President of Harding Colle9 1 1 K - 4 Searcy.Arkansas ' JllMW -I ' THAT THE price we pay for liberty lib-erty is eternal vigilance may seem like old stuff to some of us. We are prone to relax after being be-ing vigilant for five years during a hard war. Like the next man, we pay more attention to signs of optimism than to those danger signals that are likely to call us to vigilance. As modern-day Americans, we indicate by our actions and our interests that we are concerned about a lot of things but perhaps per-haps least concerned about playing play-ing Paul Revere roles. Let Samuel Sam-uel Adams and John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and A. Lincoln and all the others stay in their history books. We won our freedom in 1776, and we've kept it since. So why take the trouble to worry about being vigilant in 1947? Take the IT IS always a lot of Trouble, trouble to have a mind toward our freedoms. With three-fourths of the world embracing doctrines which oppose op-pose our cherished freedoms, and with many of the nations of the world scorning our kind of Republic, Re-public, we shall have to keep on, taking trouble to defend our way of life. This is true, even when we know that our Republic is the best and most prosperous anywhere any-where in the history of civilization. civiliza-tion. We have called America the melting pot, the place where the cradle of liberty was first rocked, the refuge of all the persecuted of hundreds of brands of minori ties. We have been a thrifty people, peo-ple, an active people, a Pe0.p1!e building a continent . all the while warding off tyrants from abroad and having a care at home for your freedoms and mine. Defense of HOW IS , IT, then, Ihe Mind that we have been caught napping? Have we not in times of confusion confu-sion at home and trouble abroad, allowed doctrines to creep in which would chain our minds and shackle our bodies as well? Distorting, Dis-torting, misleading, boring from within, state socialism at home and abroad presents to us the kind of curse that tyranny has always al-ways been to free man. Inroads have been made on some sectors of the American mind. Did you know that polls have shown that 51 of our people do not know what a balanced budget is? That virtually a third have no conception of the meaning of "free enterprise"? That many of us think it all right to owe a huge national debt to ourselves? That security is something Congress can hand out? That inflation is acceptable because it creates wealth ? That there are ways to earn more by doing less? All these things are fn"ncies. With other fallacies they v il enslave, en-slave, just as surely as any tyrant. ty-rant. We must make our platform plat-form freedom. Can there be a more constructive program than that of free men? Americans everywhere must prepare the defense de-fense of their own minds against the inroads of enslaving ideas. |