We feel very sure, however, of the worth of the work of Herbert Clark Hoover, the man who gave up a business that meant the directorship of more than 125,000 workers in order that he might give his time and his powers to the task of feeding ten million helpless people in war-ravaged Belgium and northern France.
“If England could have availed herself of such talent for organization as H. C. Hoover has displayed in feeding the Belgians, we should be a good year nearer the end of the war than we are to-day,” said a prominent member of the British Parliament.
“There is a man who knows how to get things done!” we are hearing said on every side. “If America should feel the pinch of war and famine, Mr. Hoover could meet the problem of putting us on rations, and there would be no food riots.”
Who is this man who knows how to do things? In what school did he learn how to meet emergencies and how to manage men?
They tell us he was a Quaker lad, born on an Iowa farm, who in his early boyhood moved to a farm in the far West. Was it because of this early transplanting—this change to new scenes, new problems, new interests—that he learned to see things in a big way and to get a grip on what really matters in Iowa, in Oregon, in the world?
“The first thing you think about Hoover,” said a man who knew him in college, “is that he is a free soul and feels himself free. Most people are more or less hedged in by their own little affairs. His interests have no walls to shut him away from other people and their interests. He is a man who is in vital touch with what concerns other men.”
But we come once more to the question: how did he come by the vital touch which gives him this power over men and makes him in a very real sense a citizen of the world? You remember the exclamation of envious Cassius when he was protesting to Brutus against the growing influence of Cæsar:
Now in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat does this our Cæsar feed,
That he is grown so great?
Cassius was, of course, speaking in grudging scorn; but we often find ourselves thinking quite simply and sincerely that we would like to know what goes to the making of true power.
Sometimes we like to pretend that we can explain the making of a great man. We say, for example, of Lincoln: he early learned what it meant to meet hardship, so he was strong to endure; by hard times and hard work he learned the value of things, the things that really count; he knew what sorrow was, and the faith that is greater than grief, so he had a heart that could feel with the sorrows of others and could help them to win faithfulness through suffering. Because a truly sympathetic heart beats with the joys as well as the griefs of others, he cared for the little things that go to make up the big thing we call living, and his warm human touch made him a friend of simple people, with an understanding of all. Thus it was that he knew people in a real way and life in a true way, and so was able to be the leader of a nation in a time that tried the souls of the bravest. So we say, and fancy that we have explained Lincoln. But have we? Many other boys knew toil and want and sorrow, and many learned much, perhaps, in that hard school; but there was only one Lincoln.