to desperate. It was true that even with open frontiers not much could be effected by a nation with no purchasing power, but Germany at any rate was in a position to raise certain credits abroad for the purchase of raw materials that would give work to some part at least of her idle and hungry population.

The connection between starvation and revolution is obvious. A people naturally looks to its government to give it food, and if the government proves powerless to discharge that elemental function its last claim to support disappears. The Supreme Economic Council was perpetually fighting revolution with food. Again and again, when the political condition of some particular country was under discussion, the declaration would be made by men personally cognisant of the facts that it was all a question of whether food could be rushed in in time to preserve stability. Rumania was considered to have been saved from chaos by that means. A leading Italian with whom I was discussing the insurgent Socialist movement in this country told me there would be revolution if the Allies could not find Italy the food and fuel she needed. It all depended on that. Mr. Hoover himself was a convinced believer in food as the one effective antidote to Bolshevism, and in every country where there was a government with any reasonable show of authority he made it an invariable rule that that government should be put in formal control of the food distribution, though the actual work was pretty sure to be carried out

by the Food Administration's own officers. It was a profound disappointment to the Director-General of Relief that he was not able to put his theory to the proof in Russia.

The problems Mr. Hoover left for solution when his own work at last came to its end were as much problems of transport and finance and distribution as of the supply of the actual food. I asked him what Europe had to look forward to when all he had been doing was being done no more. His hope then was that by the beginning of 1920 conditions would be sufficiently settled for sowing and reaping to go forward normally in most of the countries till then dependent on outside assistance. Some of them, like Belgium and Austria, never grew enough to meet more than a third or a quarter of their needs, and in such cases it would be for the Allies to arrange credits for the purchase of food from elsewhere. The basic fact was that there was food in the world for everyone if it could be acquired, transported and distributed in the interests of those who needed it.

The section of relief work that showed the best promise of permanence was the feeding of children. By June, 1919, no fewer than four million children were being fed on special dietaries all over Europe, the funds being provided mainly by charitable effort in the Allied countries, and the distribution resting with local committees organised in the first instance by the Food Administration's officials. Mr. Hoover had had experience of that work long before in Belgium, and

when he visited that country with President Wilson before the latter's return to America the roads everywhere were lined with what were known as Hoover's babies, because they would never have been alive at all if it had not been for Mr. Hoover.

The Director-General of Relief was in some respects the greatest personality in Paris, President Wilson himself not excepted. The two men were in curious contrast. Mr. Wilson is probably the greatest orator in America. Mr. Hoover is not far from being the worst. The one is an idealist in word as well as thought, the other in thought and deed but hardly ever in word. At one meeting of the experts of the American Commission, presided over by Mr. Wilson, Mr. Hoover observed with regard to some question under discussion, "After all, Mr. President, we must consider the expediency of that course." The President straightened in his chair. "Hoover," he said, "expediency is a word that must never be used between you and me."

No work was ever carried out with less parade and advertisement than the relief of Europe. Mr. Hoover himself has something like a terror of publicity. He believes in deeds and has no belief in talk. He is practical, executive, determined. Englishmen who crossed swords with him during the war, when they were representing Great Britain and he America in connection with international bargains, saw him in a wholly new light when they laid their shoulders to the same wheel

with him in Paris. "On the whole I think he's the biggest man here," one of them with exceptional opportunities of watching his work said to me just before that work came to an end. It was the truth, or something very near it, but not many people even in Paris ever grasped it. The Director-General of Relief kept far too much in the background for that.

CHAPTER XII

WHAT CAME OF IT ALL

HE first and the chief tangible result of the five months' discussions at Paris was the

TH

Treaty signed by sixty-six representatives of the Allies and two of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, on June 28th.

As the climax of the great drama of four-anda-half years of war and the half-year of the building of peace the signing of the Treaty was an event in the strictest sense historic. As a spectacle the ceremony was frankly a disappointment. All its concomitants, as well as all the underlying facts, should have conspired to make it memorable. In the actual event it was not merely not impressive, not merely not dignified, it was not even orderly.

Yet all the elements of the impressive were there. The stately gallery in which the ceremony was carried out is eloquent with memories. Among them all one dominated the mind. Here in 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed. Here in 1919 the defeat of that Empire's tyrannous endeavour was being written into the annals of world history.

In the figure of one man beyond all others that memory was concentrated. Who could forget that