tion of personal liberty, to say how much and what kinds of food
the people were to eat and how the business affairs of all millers and
bakers, all commission men and wholesale grocers and all food
manufacturers were to be run?

The stomach and private business of Americans are the seats of unusually
many and delicate nerve-endings. To hit the American household in the
stomach and the American business man in the pocketbook is to invite a
prompt, violent and painful reaction. Yet this is what President Wilson
asked Hoover to do and to face.

Hoover realized the full possibilities of the situation. He had seen the
rapid succession of the food dictators in each of the European
countries; their average duration of life--as food dictators--was a
little less than six months. "I don't want to be food dictator for the
American people," he said, plaintively, a few days after the President
had announced what he wanted him to do. "The man who accepts such a job
will lie on the barbed wire of the first line of intrenchments."

But besides trying to put yourself in Hoover's place, try also to put
yourself again in your own place in those great days of America's first
entry into the war, and you will get another, and a less terrifying,
view of the situation. Remember your feelings of those days as a
per-fervid patriotic American, not only ready but eager to play your
part in your country's cause. Some of you could carry arms; some could
lend sons to the khaki ranks and daughters to the Red Cross uniform.
Some could go to Washington for a dollar a year. Yet many could, for one
sufficient reason or another, do none of these things. But all could
help dig trenches at home right through the kitchen and dining-room. You
could help save food if food was to help win the war. You could help
remodel temporarily the whole food business and food use of the country
to the great advantage of America and the Allies in their struggle for
victory.

Well, Hoover put himself both in your place and in his own place. And he
thought that the food of America could be administered--not
dictated--successfully, if we would try to do it in a way consonant with
the genius of American people. Hoover had had in his Belgian relief work
an experience with the heart of America. He knew he could rely on it. He
also believed he could rely on the brain of America.

So he put the matter of food control fairly and squarely up to the
people. He asked them to make t