ble
all who were able to produce proof of American citizenship could be
given whatever was necessary to enable them to reach their own country.

And then came the next insistent call for help. And in listening to it,
and, with swift decision, undertaking to respond to it, Herbert Hoover
launched himself, without in any degree realizing it, on a career of
public service and corresponding abnegation of private business and
self-interest, that was to last all through the war and through the
armistice period, and is today still going on. In all this period of war
and after-war service he has received no salary from government or
relief organizations but, on the contrary, has given up a large income
as expert mining engineer and director of mining companies. In addition,
he has paid out a large sum for personal expenses incurred in
connection with the work.

The call was for the relief of Belgium. I know the story of Hoover in
his relation to the relief of Belgium very well because I became one of
his helpers in it soon after the war began and remained in it until the
end. But it is a hard story to tell; there is too much of it. My special
duties were of a kind to keep me constantly in touch with "the Chief,"
and I was able to realize, as only a few others were, the load of
nerve-racking responsibility and herculean labor carried by him behind
the more open scene of the public money-gathering, food-buying and
transporting, and daily feeding of the ten million imprisoned people of
occupied Belgium and France. In the relief of these helpless peoples
Hoover put, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time on
any such enormous scale and with such outstanding success, philanthropy
on a basis of what dear old Horace Fletcher, shut up with us in Belgium
during the Occupation, would permit to be referred to by no other phrase
than the somewhat hackneyed one of "engineering efficiency," unless we
would use a new word for it which he coined. In fact he used the new
word "Hooverizing" as a synonym for efficiency with a heart in it, two
years before it became familiar in America with another meaning. And I
prefer his meaning of the word to that of the food-saving meaning with
which we became familiar in Food Administration days.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; ORGANIZATION AND DIPLOMATIC DIFFICULTIES

Despite the general popular knowledge that there was a relief of Belgium
and that Hoover was its organize