ional ideals, their personal devotion to him, grew.
Hoover's relation to them recalled to me, with leapings of the heart,
those earlier days in Brussels when the eager young men of the C. R. B.
used to come rushing in from the provinces to group themselves around
him and derive fresh inspiration and determination from their contact
with him to see the job through and to see it through cleanly and
fearlessly.

These Federal Food Administrators listened to Hoover in Washington as we
listened to him in Belgium. He stirred their hearts and satisfied their
minds. And they went back to their difficult tasks, with fresh
conviction and renewed strength. And their tasks were truly difficult,
their voluntarily assumed share of the decentralized administration was
a serious one. But they, too, decentralized parts of the administration;
they set up the district and county and city administrations. And they
and their many helpers were the ones who carried food administration
into every market and grocery store and bakery and home. The whole
country, all the people, became a part of the United States Food
Administration.

And that was what Hoover wanted and intended. For he knew that only the
people, all of them working voluntarily together, could really
administer the food of America, as it had to be administered in the
great war emergency that had come to the country.

On the day after the armistice Hoover addressed the Federal Food
Administrators, gathered in Washington, for the last time. In this
address he outlined his attitude toward the future work of the Food
Administration and, even more importantly, toward governmental food
control as a policy, in the following words:

"Our work under the Food Control Act has revolved largely around
the curtailment of speculation and profiteering. This act will
expire at the signing of the peace with Germany, and as it
represents a type of legislation only justified under war
conditions, I do not expect to see its renewal. It has proved of
vital importance under the economic currents and psychology of war.
I do not consider it as of such usefulness in the economic currents
and psychology of peace. Furthermore, it is my belief that the
tendency of all such legislation, except in war, is to an
over-degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We
have secured its execution during the war as to the willing
cooeperation