Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

Almost 75 years ago, the junior Republican Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, delivered a speech from her heart about a crisis then facing our country: a crisis not arising from a foreign adversary, but from within. A crisis that threatened the values and ideals at the base of the American democratic experiment.

Her ‘Declaration of Conscience’ turned out to be one of the most important speeches of the 20th Century and defined Smith as a person of extraordinary courage and principle.

Reflecting back on the speech, she later told me that she was so nervous about the speech—this was the height of the Red Scare of the early fifties—that she told her chief aide, Bill Lewis, not to hand out the copies of the text to the press until she actually started talking on the floor, because she was afraid she might lose her nerve.

But she went through with it, and the rest is, literally, history.

TRUMP STEAMS AHEAD ON THESE CAMPAIGN PROMISES AS HE REACHES 100 DAYS IN OFFICE

Here is how she began that speech:

"Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear. It is a condition that comes from the lack of effective leadership either in the legislative branch or the executive branch of our government."

Maine Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith in her office, Washington D.C., in 1948. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

She continued,

"I think that it is high time for the

© Fox News