Transcript:

For over three centuries a steady stream of men, women and children .followed the beacon of liberty which this light symbolizes. They brought to us strength and moral fiber developed in a civilization centuries old, but fired anew by the dream of a better life in America. They brought to one new country the cultures of a hundred old ones.

I think it has not been sufficiently emphasized in the teaching of our history that the overwhelming majority of those who came from the nations of the old world to our American shores were not the laggard, nor the timorous, nor the failures. They were men and women who had the supreme courage to strike out for themselves, to abandon language and relatives, without influence, without money, without knowlege of the life in a very young civilization. And we can say for all American what the Californians said of the forty-niners, the cowards never started, and the weak died by the way. Perhaps providence did prepare this American continent of ours to be a place of the second chance. Brave millions of men and women have made it that. They adopted this homeland, because in this home, in this land they found the home which the things they most desired could be theirs: Freedom of opportunity, freedom of thought, freedom to worship God. Here they found life, because here was freedom to live.

It is the memory of all these eager-seeking millions that makes this one of America's places of great romance. Looking down this great harbor, I like to think of the countless number of inbound vessels that have made this port. I like to think of the men and women who with the break of dawn off Sandy Hook-have strained their eyes to the west for a first glimpse of the New World. They came to us, most of them, in steerage. But they in their humble quarters saw things in these strange horizons which were denied to the eyes of those who had traveled in greater luxury. They came to us speaking many tongues, but a single language, the universal language of human aspiration. How well their hopes were justified is proved by the record of what they achieved. They not only found freedom in the New World, but by their effort and devotion, they made the New World's freedom safer, and richer, more far-reaching, more capable of growth.

Within this generation that stream from abroad has largely stopped. We have within our shores today the materials out of which we shall continue to build an even better home for liberty. We take satisfaction in the thought that those who have left their native land to join us may still attain here their affection for some things left behind: old customs, old languages, old friends. Looking to the future, they wisely chose that their children shall live in the new language, and in the new customs of our new people. And those children realize more and more their common destiny in America. That is true whether their forbears came past this place eight generations ago, or only one.

The realization that we are all bound together by hope of a common future rather than by reverence for a common past has helped us to build upon this continent a unity unapproached in any similar area or similar size population in the whole world. For all our millions square miles, for all our millions of people, there is a unity in language and speech, in law and economics, in education and in general purpose which nowhere finds its match. It was the hope of those who gave us this statue and the hope of the American people in receiving it that the Goddess of Liberty and the Goddess of Peace were the same. Even in times as troubled and uncertain as these I still hold to the faith that a better civilization than any we have known is in store for America. And by our example, perhaps, for the world. Here destiny seems to have taken a long look. Into this continental reservoir, there has been poured untold and untapped wealth of human resource. Out of that reservoir, out of themelting pot, the rich promise which the new world held out to those who came to it from many lands is finding fulfillment. And the richness of the promise has not run out. If we keep the faith for our day, as those who came before us kept the faith for their's, then you and I can smile with confidence into the future. It is fitting therefore, that this should be a service of rededication, rededication to the liberty and the peace which this statue symbolizes.