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Here on my desk, within easy reach of my hand lie neat, typewritten pages bearing vital statistics; the statistics available on the lives taken, the lives ruined, the lives handicapped by the disease called poliomyelitis, or, as we term it with horrible familiarity, infantile paralysis.

But a bound book of statistics, big as the Oxford Dictionary, could not bring home to me, or to you, or to anyone, the danger and deadliness, the swift enmity and the curse that is infantile paralysis as could the sight of one living, patient, crippled child.

I have seen many such children. In my youth more than one of the boys and girls with whom I played and raced and danced was one day missing from our active circle. In, I think, my later 'teens a particularly virulent epidemic raged in my part of the world, and I remember the precautions which everyone took. Merely driving from one Long Island village to another, your car would be stopped, and uniformed policemen would look in to make sure that no child under sixteen traveled with you. At another time, visiting in a Mid-Western city, I encountered another senseless manifestation of this plague, one that struck not alone at children but at grown men and women in the early prime of their lives.

When you are young you don't think much about such things. You are dreadfully sorry for those of your friends or acquaintances who are selected by some haphazard and dreadful lottery as victims. But you don't think about yourself. You are safe, what can happen to you? Youth knows that such things, such spectres as disease and death exist, but is incredibly sure that they exist only for others.

But Youth grows up.

For almost fifteen years now, that is to say ever since the birth of the eldest of my four children, the earliest newspaper intimation that our annual scourge was with us again has elicited from me an awareness of pure terror and rebellion. We speak of "necessary" evils. But one such as this cannot be necessary, it is so unfair, it is so impersonally cruel. Nothing guarantees safety for those you love, for those you try to shelter. It strikes, with an indifferent impartiality, at children in every class of society.

It is, of course, true that the well-to-do have a slight advantage. Their children do not eat and sleep and play in foulness and filth, aiders and abettors of contagion. They can see to it that their children are kept out of crowds during a danger period, and they have doctors, hospitals, serums -- all the present weapons of battle at their command. But nevertheless their children may, and do, suffer. And often weapons are of no avail.

Not far from where I lived for a decade was a teeming section, a few short blocks between the business avenue and the residential district of that neighborhood. It still exists and abounds, I daresay, with happy, dirty youngsters, pushcarts, noise, crowding and smells. Always, it seemed to me, the first report of infantile paralysis would come from that section of the city.

After the ice and snow of winter, we have spring, the harbinger of delight. But you can look at it another way, too. The dirty snow and the encrusted ice melt, the gutters run with water, the sewers are stopped or flooded -- and the children play in the drowning streets, wading into the dark water, sailing their wooden boats. And disease plays with them, invisible and waiting, a vigilant companion. And after our spring which has, somehow, become so brief, we have heat and summer, baked pavements and the hydrants providing cooling showers for the children of the poor. And, day by day, the poliomyelitis cases are reported.

So those of us who can afford to do so flee to the country with our children or send them there, away from us, to the clean country with the swift running of natural water, the salt sea, the sparkling lakes, the good air, the high mountains -- and we think we are safe. But we aren't safe. It isn't very long before we pick up a paper and read, with our hearts wrenched, that somewhere in the Adirondacks, or in upstate New York, or on the Jersey coast, or anywhere at all, the infantile menace has struck its first blow.

None of us is secure. We are permitted to take all the precautions possible -- and after that -- well, I suppose we can pray.

This National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis is a superb and heartening thing. It is a business of mercy, a beacon of hope. I am wondering why they call it for and not against, as I write? Against of course, always against. A Foundation which will be composed of brilliant minds and careful hands and plodding research, which will, one day, we believe, succeed in stamping out this disease which imperils the very heart of our country.

For the future and the salvation of the world in any country lies not in its oldsters, its politicians, its tycoons or historians, but in its children. It is always the next generation toward which we must look for hope. It is always the next generation which must fight to leave the world a little better than it found it.

And we, it appears, have built a world which is very hard for children: a world full of war and rumors of war; a world which has not conquered disease. Stamp out one, and there's another hissing its way into public attention, like one of a nest of snakes.

Have you ever considered what it is to be a child, looking back on your own childhood, regarding for a moment, as impartially as you can, the childhood of your children, your grandchildren, the children of your friends? Stop and think about it for a moment. A child, growing up, learning the hard way -- you can't inherit wisdom and experience, any more than you can be born walking and talking -- a child, the most vulnerable creature on earth, learning that there is so much more to the world than four walls and a root, and arms which harbor him and a voice which commiserates with childish grief. A child who must fight his way through the common ailments of childhood, who is subject to danger on all sides, from accident, from the carelessness of his elders or his own inexperience, who must grow and learn and be strong; who must become aware of suffering and loss, of poverty and of fear, who must learn to love, with the mind as well as with the instinct.

Childhood is difficult enough as it is, and dangerous enough, without its constant exposure to disease. And this disease especially.

To run, to play, to shout; to be active, rich, or poor; to swim, whether in a public or private pool, or on a public or private beach; to feel the handle of the bat, solid in your obedient hands, and to listen for the sweet sound which tells you you have connected with the ball; to dance over a tennis court, or to the sound of music; to ride, whether it be on a fine saddle horse from a clean stable, or the swaybacked work horse in the farmer's field; to walk, to feel the wind in your face; to swoop down a hill on skis, to take a bellywhopper on a sled; to skate ... in short, to be perfectly coordinated, with limbs that obey you, with muscles that are sound. This is childhood's birthright.

But for the children who have had infantile paralysis, for the children who are yet to have it -- and do you realize that among them may be your children or my children? -- this birthright is forfeit, it has been repudiated; it, suddenly, does not exist.

I have been in the children's wards of great hospitals, I have been in orthopedic hospitals, I have seen children on the streets, I have sat with a neighbor's child who someday may learn to walk -- a little. I have seen with my own eyes incredible patience, the patience of children. And patience is unnatural to childhood and youth. It should not be learned then, not, as it were, in one swift, undreamed of, ghastly lesson. It does not belong, it is for the old, and the tired, and the wise.

We are a great country. We have great resources. We are an impulsive and generous people. But when disaster overtakes any section of these United States, or indeed when, no matter where, there is catastrophe, the people of this country are ready with their sympathy and help. But infantile paralysis is not a flood or a famine, it is not a fire or an earthquake. It cannot come to us in great roaring headlines, as a terrific shock; it does not speak to us with the voice of radio or the news-reel, or enlist our aid by means of the still camera. It is simply-always with us. A national disaster, if you like, but one that makes no bid for sympathy by sensational suddenness, or by its uniqueness. It does not crash, so to speak, into our lives with the force and terror of a burning airship or a falling airplane. It is simply here. . . .

It is never really quiet. There are interludes when it does not stir -- much; and then, always, the interval, in which it stirs, actively.

It is your continuous calamity and it is mine. When you help build this protection against it, when you help arm the soldiers who will fight it, you are protecting yourself and your children and your children's children. You are building for the present, and for the future.

Someday there will be clean cities, and there will not be slums. Someday there will be serums, vaccines -- whatever they will term them. Someday there will be enlightened parents, as now there are ignorant parents. Someday there will be immunity, and the children of that era will walk with straight limbs, will run and play and laugh and be free of that invisible, that crippling, devastating playmate.

Then there will be no more wheelchairs and braces, no more iron lungs, no more teaching patience to children who have hardly learned more than impatience, so new are they to living.

We cannot free the children of the future from all the hard lessons they may learn. We cannot protect them, I suppose, against the insatiable greed of mankind, which has never learned its lesson. But we can increase their chances of growing to manhood and womanhood, straight and strong.

It is, of course, perfectly true that in many instances this disease strikes lightly. But why should it strike at all? It is also true that in innumerable cases the handicaps left in its wake have been overcome, in greater or lesser degree. But why, in the name of heaven, should any child be handicapped?

Nothing in the world, nothing on earth is more important and more treasurable than a child; the growing, active body, the growing active mind. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis is pledged to safeguard youth. Who fails to help in this magnificent mission fails not alone the children of today, but the unborn; fails not in a duty, but in a trust.

Have I no word which will insure you, and them, against failing?

I am afraid that I have not, being mortal, but long, long ago there was One Who spoke such a word, in the cause of childhood throughout all the ages.

"For of such," He said, "is the Kingdom of Heaven."