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question facing this nation is whether we shall once again command leadership, and then maintain it never to be relinquished.  For if we do not, some other nation will.  We have no monopoly of brains; nor are other nations lacking in the will to push ahead.  Advance there will be - today's boasts will seem puny beside tomorrow's progress.  Will our flag be borne ahead in that advance? 

It certainly will fall behind if we continue further to neglect our research facilities by refusing or deferring the modest appropriation for an additional station for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.  And even if we provide most handsomely for the scientist, he will labor in vain unless there is a great and strong industry which can translate his contributions into effective commercial use.  The indispensable condition for such an industry - for an industry which not only serves the pleasure and convenience of peacetime life, but is also, as the President says, "the backlog of national defense" - is that there shall be a coordinate and stable regime of unified governmental regulation which will enable the industry to grow, commanding the faith of investors and the confidence of management. To retreat by one step from the position assumed by Congress in the Civil Aeronautics Act, to chop up the industry and parcel its regulation among different agencies, as proposed in the pending Omnibus Transportation Bills, would be a fatal mistake. 

A member of the Congress* recently reminded the nation that we permitted our Yankee clippers of the seven seas, once so proudly in the can of the world's shipping, to decline and virtually to expire.  The billions which this disastrous course has cost us since 1914 cannot be overlooked.  The discriminations to which our shippers in the world's water-borne commerce have been subjected because of their dependence upon foreign flags cannot be ignored.  The humiliation which we suffered when we were forced to pay hire to foreign bottoms to service our fleet when we sought to send it around the world as a demonstration of our might cannot be forgotten. These cost in dollars and in prestige we might have avoided had we been true to the traditions of the ocean clippers which once left the flags of others in the wake of Old Glory.

Today we have new Yankee clippers-clippers of the Heavens.  These new clippers of the skies were supreme a year ago.  But already their supremacy is challenged.  We must make haste, even in the best of cases, to assure the their proud career will remain, as it should be. unmatched.  Fatal to our efforts will be fresh vacillation in governmental policy. If our energies and our resources are spend in blind search through the fog of conflicting jurisdiction we invite for the generations to come to burdens of a Munich.  Appeasement of the strong is the destiny of the weak.  May we never have thus to bow to the dictates of a superior commercial and military power of the air. 
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[[note]]
*See remarks of Congressman Jennings Randolph, Cong. Rec. for February 20, 1939, at p. 2355 (pamphlet copy)