It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World.

I have got up at truly deplorable hours in the morning to confront Vancouver's Jack Webster on television because I have been told that is the place to get exposure for ideas.

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.

Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you. But liberty, you see, that precious child of our liberal democracy only two hundred years old, has one notable side effect. When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice. In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.

I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity of travelling across this country and enduring all the classic situations that go with talking to people.

Indeed, we Jews were at the leading edge of communist totalitarianism, one of the most murderous movements of the 20th century.

In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.