Mr. President, it is all about opportunity; it is about working together. When he traveled through America more than 100 years ago, the great French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville , was struck by how caring Americans were for each other.

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The Americans . . . regard for themselves, constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property for the welfare of others.

What the Act I introduced today seeks is to undo 30 years of Washington discouraging that very basic American instinct to help one another. The ideas in the Act are not new. They are, in fact, old ideas in America. They have been tested and found successful.

About 100 years ago, cities like New York were littered with alcoholics and addicts. Orphaned children roamed the streets. And if all of New York City's liquor shops, houses of prostitution, gambling houses, and other low-life establishments had been placed on a single street, they would have extended from Manhattan's City Hall to the City of White Plains more than 30 miles away. On that street, there would have been a robbery every 165 yards and a murder every half mile. And in Brooklyn, one out of every ten people got food from public storehouses.

These pathologies met their match, Mr. President, in society's intermediary, nongovernmental, voluntary, private institutions of charity and assistance. Their warm-hearted and hard-headed approaches--and you can have a warm heart and a hard head when it comes to making sure that we change such circumstances--helped save women and children and men. As the historian Marvin Olasky notes, `The solutions these reforms came up with forestalled an epidemic of illegitimacy and saved thousands of children from misery.'

I believe that as we confront our own social pathologies today, we must do it the same way--with the ideas that have worked in the past and yet with new ideas for the 1990's--even though they may have been the standard fare of the 1890's. We must meet our challenges with a greater role for States and a greater role for intermediary institutions, nongovernmental organizations, private charities--both larger ones like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and smaller ones like Best Friends and the Sunshine Mission.

So while the CIVIC Act begins the process of moving welfare from Washington to the States, it also begins the vital task of reinvigorating our private, nongovernmental organizations which can help meet the deepest needs of our citizens, organizations that we know will help solve our welfare problems.

The change that we want to see will not occur overnight. Neither will it come without hard work or thorough debate. The end of colonialism was not an easy process either. For independence means risk, the sacrifice of security.

Well, security, coupled with dependency is a bad bargain. Economic mobility means work; it means hard work. But no nation and no people who have ever tasted the sweet fruits of freedom has ever called for a return to its colonial dependency.

I believe that if we want to make sure that we are free and we remain free, we must reform the welfare system. It can be a part of a large reform in which we reform the financial integrity of America, for we cannot hold hostage future generations to the spending of the present.

As we seek to pass the budget in the hours ahead in this Chamber, it will be a pleasure to do so in a way that not only puts us on a footing of sound financial integrity, but establishes us on a path toward economic independence and opportunity for individuals --through a reformed welfare system, characterized by block grants maximizing the States' flexibility and innovation, and characterized by Government joining hands with nongovernmental agencies in order to bring to the battle the energies and talents of this great Nation's private citizens.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Missouri.