, could deal in
wheat and exert its influence in the maintenance of the fair price by
acting as a dominant commercial agency for the buying, selling, and
distribution of wheat.

Second, the licensing of all store handlers and millers of wheat and
controlling them both through voluntary agreements and license
regulations.

Third, the prohibition of trading in futures.

As an illustration of the results quickly obtained by these measures we
may note that while the farmer was getting in the year just before the
war about 27 per cent of the cost of each loaf of bread for the wheat in
it, to which the miller added about 6-1/2 per cent and the middlemen and
bakers the remaining 66-1/2 per cent, and in 1915, after the war began,
the respective proportions were 30 per cent, 11 per cent, and 59 per
cent, in 1918, after the Food Administrator's control was in force, the
farmer got 40 per cent, the miller 3 per cent, and the others 57 per
cent. Or, as another illustration, while in 1917, when there was no food
control the difference between the price of the farmers' wheat and the
flour made from it was $11.00 per barrel this margin during Food
Administration days was about $3.50.

An enumeration of the many and ingenious measures adopted by Hoover and
Julius Barnes, the self-sacrificing and highly efficient head of the
Grain Corporation, to acquit themselves and the Government with fairness
to all interests of the tremendous responsibility and undertaking thus
imposed on them would carry us beyond the limits of our space. These
controllers of the American wheat had in their hands the fate of
nations. The Allies had to be supplied; and the American farmers had to
be stimulated to top effort; and the American consumers, which means the
whole people, had to be kept uninjured in working efficiency and
undismayed by possibility of food panic which would result from
prohibitive prices, or actual shortage. If the war was to be won there
simply had to be wheat enough for all, America and Allies alike, and it
had to be available both as regards distribution and price.

The results of the American wheat control can be summed up in one word:
success. The unwearying labors and undiminished devotion necessary to
achieve this success in face of great difficulties and much criticism
cannot be so readily summed up. But without them the history of the war
would have been a different history. We should never forget this. In the
records of the