The five campaigns which united such an aggregation of workers and which produced such remarkable results were carried forward with a minimum of expense. Never before in the history of finance had such widespread exploitation been accomplished at so low a cost. Of the million workers all but a small nucleus were volunteers; the resources of the country were thrown open to the organizers with unexampled prodigality, mediums of flotation in a veritable flood being contributed without cost to the officers in the Liberty Loan Army.
A single purpose animated the whole nation. Party lines, race prejudice, creed distinctions, social barriers, all were wiped out in these loan drives. The whole country formed itself into an All-American team that rushed onward irresistibly. The closest approximation to a common brotherhood had been achieved. War, with its terrible losses, with its impairment of lusty young men, with its heartbreaks and agonies, surely had not been waged in vain when it brought about such a unity.
The United States in waging the war for democracy had won that democracy for herself at home.
VIII—FOOD AND THE WAR
How Scientific Control and Voluntary Food-Saving Kept Belgium from Starving and Enabled the Allies to Avert Famine
By VERNON KELLOGG
Member of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium
America was made familiar with a slogan during 1917 and 1918 which declared that "Food Will Win the War." The European Allies became familiar from the very beginning of the war with the fact that without much more food than they could count on from their own resources they could not hope to win the war. And it became equally obvious to Germany and her associates that if their normal food resources were materially impaired they also could not hope to win the war.
So there arose almost from the beginning of the great military struggle an equally great struggle to get food and to keep food from being got. The Allies, devoting their manpower to fighting and munitions-making, saw their farms doomed to neglect and their food reduction doomed to lessen. And they began their call on America for food in such quantities as America had never dreamed of exporting before. In the last years before the war we had been sending about five million tons of foodstuffs a year to Europe. In 1918 we sent over fourteen million tons. Also the Allies began trying, by their blockade, to prevent the Central Empires from adding to their own inevitably lessened native production by importations from without.
On the other hand, Germany and her associates began to husband carefully their internal food supplies by instituting a rigid, or would-be rigid, control of internal marketing and consumption, and to collect from any outside sources still accessible to them, such as the contiguous neutral lands, whatever food was possible. Also they had strong hopes of preventing, by their submarine warfare, the provisioning of the Allies from America and other overseas sources.