lied to this grain.

Hoover had learned in Belgium, and by his observation of the situation
in England and Europe, that the poetic expression that bread is the
staff of life becomes endowed with an intense practical significance to
the food controllers and the peoples in bread-eating countries suffering
from food-shortage. The loudest call of hungry people, their primary
anxiety and the first care of the food-controlling authorities all
converge on wheat. The dietetic regime for a semi-starving people is
strong or weak, appeasing or dangerous, in proportion to the bread it
contains. If the bread ration is normal or sufficient much repression
can be used in the case of other foods. With bread there is life. The
call of the Allies on America was for wheat above all else. More than
one half of the normal dietary of France is composed of wheat bread.
England normally uses less bread and more meat, but in the war time she
found she could lessen meat supply more safely than bread supply. It was
for the possible lack of 75,000,000 bushels of wheat that Lord Rhondda
saw the defeat of the Allies staring him in the face.

The government control of the American wheat as contrasted with its
voluntary conservation, took many forms, touching it as grain, as flour,
and as bread, as object of special stimulation for production, as prior
commodity for transportation, and as export product. But curiously, that
feature of its control for which the Food Administration has been most
subject to ill-considered criticism is one for which the Food
Administration has the least responsibility; this is the
government-established "fair price" to the grower.

The Food Control Law as passed by Congress in August, 1917, contained a
provision, guaranteeing a price of two dollars a bushel for the 1918
wheat crop. It was put in to stimulate production to insure the needed
supply for the war period. And it was intended to benefit the farmer. On
the basis of this the Government would presumably be able, by proper
regulation of the food handlers and commercial practices intermediate
between the producer and consumer, both to assure the farmers of a good
price and the consumer of not being driven to panic and revolt by an
impossible cost of his daily bread. That such a regulation was
absolutely and immediately necessary was obvious from the fact that at
the very time the Food Administration was being organized unofficially
along the lines of conservation p