We use our resources to the best of our abilities. In the Indies, where our forces won fresh laurels together with yours, stubborn resistance continues locally. Our Navy is on duty every day. Our mercantile marine, still one of the largest, has been completely integrated in the navigational effort of the United Nations, fighting off Axis submarines and raiders in close companionship with your own brave seafaring men. Those of us who have the inestimable privilege of being free feel that it our holy duty towards our enslaved compatriots in East and West to do whatever we can to hasten the day of victory.
Democracy is our most precious heritage.
We cannot breathe in the sullen atmosphere of despotic rule. The people of the Netherlands have developed their free institutions in their own progressive way, in accordance with their high regard for personal and national liberty. They had long approached the complete realization of the four freedoms which the President of the United States has set as one of the aims of our common war effort. Throughout my reign, the development of democracy and progress in the Netherlands Indies has been our constant policy. Under Netherlands stewardship, a great number of peoples and tribes are being systematically merged into one harmonious community, in which all these elements, the Indonesians in their rich variety of religions, languages, arts and customary laws, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Westerners, feel equally at home.