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aid. It is not a luxury of modern foreign policy. It is, in fact, the obvious accommodation between countries where saving is easy and automatic and those where it is difficult and painful. It is the principal basis for harmonious coexistence between the rich countries and the poor.
    And it has been serving this purpose very well. In the last fifteen years, errors and setbacks notwithstanding, the United States has won a position of influence and esteem in the poor lands. We are regarded not as remote, self-interested and selfish, as well we might be. On the whole, we are considered a friend with a concern for the less fortunate. This is a great achievement for a nation that is both economically and geographically as far removed from the experience of the poor countries as we are. There should be no doubt as to what accomplished it. It was not our military power. It was not the acuity of our propaganda. It was not the exceptional deftness of our intelligence organization. It was not even the skill or eloquence of our diplomats, political or professional. It was the American aid program. One type of modern conservative opposes the aid program because he imagines all change, including that which conserves peace and stability, to be a conspiracy against the American form of government or, at a minimum, his pocketbook. I do not worry about these people. They have always been with us; they add variety to life. Their ancestors opposed steam navigation, fire and the wheel. Their fathers opposed the cream separator and the National Banking System. But I confess to some discouragement over the tendency of more thoughtful conservatives, as well as men of liberal goodwill, to become apologetic about foreign aid. We need to adjustthe form of aid much more closely to the circumstances of the poor lands—as I will argue in the next two lectures. But we must also bear in mind that it is our most distinctive contribution to the comity of nations.
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    Next it is evident that we should be cautious about urging forms of organization that are commonplace in the rich countries upon the poor. We have always mistrusted the man who mounts the rostrum to demand that the world commit itself here and now to free enterprise as it is uniquely revealed to the orator. There is a suspicion that he is not so much interested in spreading free enterprise as in provoking applause. But we also see that the imperatives of the poor country, as regards economic organization, are very different from our own. The notion that a moderately well-to-do country and a poor one can have a common economic policy has been a prime source of friction between the Soviets and China. It would be equally a source of friction between the United States and the Indians were we to insist that they do precisely as we do. We should not be above imitating the accomplishments of the Communist countries. We need not imitate their errors.
    It is also evident that relations between the rich and the poor countries are likely to be touchy—as also the relations between the poor lands themselves. We must bear in mind that the governments of these countries are subject to pressures, growing out of their poverty, from which we are exempt. Our more tranquil reactions are not the mark of superior patience but of superior fortune. To realize this is to be more tolerant and more painstaking in the never-finished tasks of mediation, negotiation and compromise.
    There are other lessons ranging from those that grow out of the relation of poverty to the birthrate and the bearing of this onbirth control techniques to the prospects, given the difficulties I have cited, for development itself. But I should like to postpone further discussion of remedies until we have had a closer look at the poor lands. We have seen that poverty produces much that is common in behavior. We must now see that it has many differences as to cause.

III
C AUSE AND C LASSIFICATION
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    We have seen that poverty