Three days later a young man appeared. He said, "I am here to represent the Red Cross. Would you mind telling me about your baby work?"
"Are you from the Children's Bureau?"
"No, I am Vital Statistics."
After the Refugees Bureau sent two inspectors to look into my activities, the Children's Bureau finally did come. They "took over" my work, which meant that no more babies in my quarter of Paris received layettes from the United States.
When I finally handed over my œuvre to the Red Cross, the interview with the husky well-fed football player of a doctor was refreshing. He was full of enthusiasm, and I felt instinctively that he was an able man with broad vision and an open mind. But, like all the men at 4 Place de la Concorde, he did not give the French credit for having already thought of and worked out many of the problems he wanted to solve. His attitude towards the French put them in what Abe and Mawruss would call the "new beginner" class in the matter of baby welfare. He cheerfully told me of organizing plans for saving French babies, plans which, compared with what we had been doing, were Kolossal. But the plans included some things which I knew would not go and others which the French had already worked out more successfully than my own compatriots. Puericulture is an advanced science in France, where baby lives are more precious than anywhere else in the world. I had tried some of the things he wanted to do and had run up against a stone wall. So had other American women. I started to sputter, but stopped short of speech. For I had a lightning vision of how parents must feel when their children, grown to manhood, plunge into work and do things they might be saved from if only—. I felt motherly towards this capable young man who was as old as myself. But something about him gave me confidence that he would work it out all right. And I knew that he was in no frame of mind to benefit by my experience.
CHAPTER XXIV
UNCOMFORTABLE NEUTRALITY
THE following letter was in my husband's mail one day:
"A young American came to Paris about twenty-five years ago, lived for a time in the Latin Quarter, and then, following the loss of his income, obtained a minor position in the office of an importer of American goods. He liked his work, rose to a place of responsibility, eventually went into business for himself, and developed the business to a prosperous issue.
"He held the theory that the few Americans living and working abroad formed the nucleus of American overseas industrial expansion and that they were regarded by Europeans as representative of their fellow-countrymen. He felt that it was his duty to conduct his business and social activities in such a manner as to merit the confidence and respect of his hosts. Had he been indifferent to these responsibilities or had his patriotic fire ever burned low, his association with the active members of the American Chamber of Commerce in France and the American Club in Paris would have surely recalled and revived them. Every one knows of the results attained by these organizations in their effort to maintain the feeling of sympathetic understanding between the two great sister republics during the long and difficult period of 'watchful waiting.' Such services enter into the realm of practical diplomacy and could have been rendered efficient only by men of high standing and of the highest order of patriotism.
"I wish to call your attention to the editorial page of an American weekly, which boasts of millions of readers, where we see a vicious attack upon ourselves. I quote textually: 'Things had reached a point among our expatriates, the fifty-eighth and lowest form of cootie, that in home circles to be pro-American was really bad form.'