main theme of the speech was strengthening the free world against communism, in his fourth point Truman also appealed to the motives of compassion and pride in civilization. "For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people." The United Nations followed up the US initiative later that year by setting up an Extended Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA) to help pool international donor funds for technical assistance and distribute them through UN agencies. EPTA was a precursor of UNDP. U.S. aid for development in the 1950s came to include grants and concessional loans as well as technical assistance. This development aid was administered alongside military aid within the framework of the Mutual Security Act. But for most of the decade there was no major multilateral body to provide concessional loans. An initiative to create such a body under the UN met with resistance from the U.S. on the grounds that it was premature. Accordingly, when the UN's "Special Fund" was created at the end of 1958, its remit was only for technical assistance not loans. (The Special Fund was differentiated from EPTA by assisting public infrastructure rather than industrial projects.) In 1959, a significant annual amendment to the Mutual Security Act declared that it was "a primary objective of the United States" to assist "the peoples of other lands who are striving to establish and develop politically independent and economically viable units". This shifted the emphasis of U.S. economic aid away from immediate Cold War security needs, towards supporting the process of dismantling the empires of the UK, France and other European colonial powers. The amendment also made clear that Congress expected those industrialized nations which had been helped by U.S. aid to rebuild after the war would now share more of the burden of helping less-developed countries. Following on, the U.S. encouraged the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) to set up a Development Assistance Group (DAG) composed of the main donor states, in order to help coordinate their aid. This was done in January 1960. The following year the DAG adopted a "Resolution of the common aid effort", vowing to increase the volume of aid, and to share the task equitably. Shortly after this, the OEEC was succeeded by the OECD, expanding its scope from Europe to the world, and embracing a particular concern with less-developed countries. The