This exchange of needed goods by barter solved in some degree the impossible financial situation, gave the people an incentive to work, and helped reduce political inflammation. It was practical statesmanship meeting things as they were and not as they might more desirably be, but were not. I say again, and many men in the governments of
Eastern Europe, and even in the councils in Paris[1] have said, that Hoover saved Eastern Europe from anarchy, and held active Bolshevism to its original frontiers. That meant saving Western Europe, too.
Then Hoover came back to America to be an American private citizen again. That is what he is today. He is still carrying on two great charities in Eastern Europe: the daily feeding of millions of under-nourished children, and the making possible, through his American Relief Warehouses, for anyone in America to help any relatives or friends anywhere in Eastern Europe by direct food gifts. But he is doing it as private citizen. The story of Hoover—as far as I can write it today—is that of an American who saw a particular kind of service he could render his country and Eu
rope and humanity in a great crisis. He rendered it, and thus most truly helped make the world safe for Democracy and human ideals. It would only be fair to add to his Belgian citation the larger one of American Citizen of the World and Friend of All the People. But he would only be embarrassed if anyone attempted to do it now. We can safely leave the matter to History.
[1] The official representative of the Treasury of one of the Allied powers, who had no reason to be too friendly to the American director of relief, for Hoover had often to oppose the policies of this power in the Paris councils, has recently written of him: "Mr. Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation. This complex personality, with his habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, of exhausted prizefighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, imported into the Councils of Paris, when he took part in them, precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness, which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace."