s under
license, and authority was provided to issue regulations prescribing
just, reasonable, non-discriminatory and fair storage charges,
commissions, profits, and practices. This license control was the Food
Administration's principal means of enforcing provisions against all
wasteful, unjust, and unreasonable charges and procedures.

But it was far from easy to determine all at once either what trades and
commodities should be taken under control or what kind and degree of
control should be exercised. As Hoover said to the Senate Committee on
Agriculture, using a metaphor springing from his engineering experience:

"It is impossible, in constructing routes and bridges through the
forest of speculation and difficulty to describe in advance the
route and detail of these roads and bridges which we must push
forward from day to day into the unknown."

And, referring again to the same matter in an address before the United
States Chamber of Commerce in September, 1917, he said:

"We shall find as we go on with the war and its increasing economic
disruption, that first one commodity then another will need to be
taken under control. We shall, however, profit by experience if we
lay down no hard and fast rules, but if we deal with each situation
on its merits. So long as demand and supply have free play in a
commodity we had best leave it alone. Our attention to the break in
normal economic control in other commodities must be designed to
repair the break, not to set up new economic systems or theories."

Hoover believed in making haste slowly. But he had to move. The crisis
of the situation was upon us, the dike was already leaking and measures
were demanded which would stop the leak before it became a flood. In the
exigency there was no time for the Food Administrator to devise and
carefully test plans suggested by even the most favored theories of
economists, if these plans offered remedies which would only be
available in an indeterminate future. The scope of the war had
disorganized the life and practices of the whole world, had overthrown
all precedents, shattered all fundamental relations. And on nothing was
its disturbing influence upon the normal more potent than in relation to
food supply.

The means of control by license regulations adopted by the Food
Administration were many and various. From the beginning the stocks of
manufacturers and dealers