CHAPTER V

IN CHINA

When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing, promptly accepted it.

In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's office in San Francisco.

However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from there his second start to the far-away lands from which his loudest calls seemed to come—ready, that is, except for one thing. He was now, let us remember, at this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty-five years old, not that by half a year, indeed, and a half year could mean, as we have already seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a boy-man with a record already behind him of achievement and a position already in his hands of much responsibility and large salary. So he declared that the time had now come for the carrying out of the decision he had made in his college days of four years before. It was the little matter, you will promptly guess, and guess correctly, of marrying the girl of the geology department. He arrived in San Francisco the first of February, 1899. He spent the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific capital" of Stevenson's charming sketch, but of chief interest to Hoover as the place where Lou Henry—that was her name—lived. And here they were married at noon of Friday, February 10. At two o'clock they left for San Francisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the empire of China.

Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town on the curving sands of the shores of the blue Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, boy engineer had come from distant Australia, by way of Marseilles and London, had clutched up the beautiful daughter of the respected town banker, and was now carrying her off to distant China, where she was to live in all the state becoming the wife of the Director-General of Mines of the Celestial Empire. It was a bit too much for the old Pacific capital, which did not know—for it was not told—that the sudden appearance of the meteor bridegroom had been preceded by many astronomical warnings in the way of electric messages that came to the prospective bride from Australia and London and New York. Anyway, it wasn't quite fair to the town, which tries to maintain old Mexican traditions, that go back to Spain, of a full assortment of festivities incident to any proper marrying. But Monterey has long been reconciled to this missed opportunity, and now reveals a just pride as the home town of the woman who has played such an active role in the career of her distinguished husband.

The hurrying couple, at least, had time for breath-taking—and honeymoon—when once on board ship. For it is a month's voyaging from San Francisco to China—or, at least, was then. They had for seat-mates at table Frederick Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which was the beginning of a friendship that still endures. And there were for other interesting companions a secretary of our legation at Peking and his wife, and a missionary pair who may or may not have survived the Boxer massacres.

The work in China was at first rather simple. Mines, of course, there were and had been for uncounted centuries. But what was needed by the new Department was some sort of survey of the mineral resources and mining possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative framing of a code of mining laws, so that the new development of the mines of the country which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried on to best advantage, and in such a way that private enterprise could participate in it. For centuries the mines had been Crown property and the ruler had simply let them out directly, or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could be wrung from the lessees in any of several various ways. And there had to be some rental or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that could get within arm's length of the mining business. The tenure of the use of the mines by the lessees was usually simply the period of the continued satisfaction of the lessor.

All this had not made for any extensive new opening up of the country's mineral resources, or for the scientific development of the mines already long known. One could not afford to put much capital into prospecting or into modernizing the mining methods when each improvement simply meant either more rent or "squeeze," or the giving up of the mine. So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous possibilities of improvement. It would have been hard for any mining engineer to do anything at all to the situation without improving it. For Hoover, with his technical education in metallurgical processes, his experience in handling various and difficult mining situations, and his genius for organizing and systematizing, the opportunity was simply unique. He plunged into the work of examining and planning and codifying with the zest of a naturalist in an unexplored jungle. In the day time he made his examination; at nights he studied the mining laws of all time and all the world.

He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be put together and correlated with the tasks before it. He had sent in advance for two or three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able and dependable associates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's sobriquet among his early mining associates; just as it was later among the members of his successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally—not artificially—always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and associates.

His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, interpreters, etc. A few of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic; the latter so devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the new Director of Mines when he found he was not a baseball player. But he thought better of him when he learned that he had at least managed his college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tientsin, where were also the principal laboratories for the mineralogists, assayers, and chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines' of China, while Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English all that had been printed in Chinese literature. But the Director and most of his immediate experienced assistants were chiefly occupied with the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the Minister let it be known that he expected the new Director to pay the way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign experts.

These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with Hoover's earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies. These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry. Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs. Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of small things."

A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming, practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position who was terribly bored—as he is today—by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be thinking," was glad to be out of all this as much as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and thirst, and even with hostile natives.

Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.

"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold beneath it?" And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials, were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away, whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously digging into it.

Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China. He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.

Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a traditional part of Chinese mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.

The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families—and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win.

But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her. With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town. Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within, an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his Woerterbuch English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home empty-handed."

As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines. Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover's name for the protection of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but did undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer to superintend the real development of the great property.

The wily old Celestial finding, after all, that China was not to be partitioned by the powers that had defended it against the Boxers, and that private property was not to be confiscated, now proposed to break his contract so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no hope that the curious course of Chinese law would ever compel him to recognize his previous agreements. But there was something in the persistent, indomitable pressure of the quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named de Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, and of the young American, which did finally compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble and delay, to live up to his contract.

Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original contracts it had been agreed to have a Chinese board with a Chinese chairman, as well as a foreign board. This led to much difficulty and some of the Europeans declared that the young American had been much at fault in consenting to an arrangement which left so much share in the control to the Chinese, and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover and de Wouters had a long hard struggle in getting justice for old Chang, but just as their persistence had earlier held Chang up to his agreements for the sake of the European owners of the undertaking, so now, directed in the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting justice for Chang and his Chinese group.

The affair brought him into business relations with another Belgian named Emile Francqui, of keen mind and great personal force, who, with de Wouters, were, strangely enough, later to be chief and first assistant executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian Comite National during the long hard days of the German Occupation. It was with these men among all the Belgians that Hoover was to have most to do in connection with his work as initiator and director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

But we are now, in the story of Herbert Hoover, only in the year 1900, and the Belgian Relief did not begin until 1914. And Hoover was still to have many experiences as engineer and man of affairs, before he was to meet his Belgian acquaintances again under the dramatic conditions produced by the World War.

He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the world.



CHAPTER VI

LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly "on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English." His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America, and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an expatriate.

But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.

After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however, too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.

There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four years' struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection with the firm and launched on that career of independent and self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in 1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading consulting mining engineer in the world.

His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia. Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines. These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert, four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living and working conditions in the desert were a little worse than awful, but by his technical and organizing ability he brought to life the two or three abandoned mines which constituted the Broken Hills properties, and, adding to them some adjoining lower grade mines, converted the whole group from a state of great but unrealized possibilities into one of highly profitable actualities. An important factor in this achievement was his origination and successful development of a process for extracting the zinc from ores that had already been treated for the other metals and then cast aside as worthless residues. There were fourteen million tons of these residues on the Broken Hills dumps and from them he derived large returns for the company that he had organized to purchase the property.

He also introduced new metallurgical processes for the profitable handling of the low-grade sulphide ores that constituted most of the mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this work in South Australia did much to help prove to him what has long been one of his cardinal beliefs, namely, that the safe backbone of mining lies in the handling of large bodies of low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies are given the benefit of proper metallurgical processes and large organizing and intelligent building up of exterior plants, mining leaves the realms of speculation and becomes a certain and stable business operation.

All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months. Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple association of his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling.

Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery. He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians.

The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild, bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc, iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build 350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual "mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs to steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a large sum of English, Canadian and American money—including much of his own—into the work of building up a great establishment which was just on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of the money put into it.

Other large operations under his direction were in Colorado, Mexico, Korea, the Malay Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India (Burma). The Burma undertaking has been, in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in many other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in mining engineering and organization. It is today the greatest silver-lead mine in the world, although it started from as near to nothing as a mine could be and yet be called a mine. It took him and his associates five years to transform some deserted works in the heart of a jungle into the foremost producer of its kind in all the world. This mine is far away in the north of Burma, almost on the Chinese border. They had first to build eighty miles of railroad through the jungle and over two ranges of mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establishing the mine.

Altogether Hoover and his associates had in their employment, in the various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And practically all of these successful mines had been made out of unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think. But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system, skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great miner because he is—I say it bluntly and not from any blind hero-worship—a great man.

If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoover began a new chapter in his work because the world had begun a new epoch in its history, let us have a glimpse of this man outside of his mines and his offices. Let us see him in his home, with his family, with his books if he has any, and with his friends of whom he has many.

His two children, Herbert and Allan, were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Living first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they and the boys and the dog Rags needed more room, or perhaps, better, different kind of room, room for an energetic family of Americans to grow up in Western American fashion, as far as this could be compassed in London. And so they found, farther west, in a short street just off Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old house with a garden with real trees in it and some grass and flower-beds. It had been built long before by somebody who liked room, and then rebuilt, or at least made over and added to, by Montin Conway, the Alpinist and author. For generations it had been called "The Red House," a name that became in the succeeding years more and more widely known to Americans living in, coming to, or passing through London, for it became a well-known house of American foregathering.

I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some work in the British Museum Library. The bedroom to which my wife and I were shown was inhabited already by a happy and very vocal family of little Javanese seed birds and green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menagerie which had to find refuge from the other animals already housed in their adjoining rooms. Out in the garden there were pigeons fluttering in and out of a cote, and hens solemnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. A big silver Persian cat, and a smaller yellow Siamese one regularly attended breakfasts, and Rags irregularly attended everything. The cats were Mr. Hoover's favorites. He liked to have one on his lap as he talked.

There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, and I noted that the owner, however many the guests had been, or long the evening, never went up to bed without a book in his hand. I came later to know how fixed this night-reading habit had become, for in the Belgian relief years when we had frequently to cross the perilous North Sea together on our way from Thames-mouth to Holland or back in one of the little Dutch boats which used to run across twice a week until most of the boats had been blown up by floating mines, Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket lamp or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.

The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well. Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was there in extenso. The books on civics and economics and theories of finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner, was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my role was chiefly that of fascinated listener.

Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims to authorship himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a book which, under the title of Principles of Mining, has been a well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a model of modest appraisement of his work. One of its paragraphs simply demands quotation:

"The bulk of the material presented [in this book] is the common heritage of the profession, and if any may think there is insufficient reference to previous writers, let him endeavor to find to whom the origin of our methods should be credited. The science has grown by small contributions of experience since, or before, those unnamed Egyptian engineers, whose works prove their knowledge of many fundamentals of mine engineering six thousand eight hundred years ago. If I have contributed one sentence to the accumulated knowledge of a thousand generations of engineers or have thrown one new ray of light on the work, I shall have done my share."

In the latter chapters of the book Hoover, having devoted the earlier chapters to technical methods, treats of the administrative and financial phases of mining. The last chapter is devoted to the "character, training, and obligations of the mining engineering profession" in which he sets up a standard of professional ethics for the engineer of the very highest degree and reveals clearly his own genuinely philanthropic attitude toward his fellow men. In the discussion of mining administration there is a concise but illuminating treatment of the subject of labor unions. After discussing contract work and bonus systems he says:

"There is another phase of the labor question which must be considered, and that is the general relations of employer and employed. As corporations have grown, so likewise have the labor unions. In general, they are normal and proper antidotes for unlimited capitalistic organization.

"Labor unions usually pass through two phases. First, the inertia of the unorganized labor is too often stirred only by demagogic means. After organization through these and other agencies, the lack of balance in the leaders often makes for injustice in demands, and for violence to obtain them and disregard of agreements entered upon. As time goes on, men become educated in regard to the rights of their employers and to the reflection of these rights in ultimate benefit to labor itself. Then the men, as well as the intelligent employer, endeavor to safeguard both interests. When this stage arrives, violence disappears in favor of negotiation on economic principles, and the unions achieve their greatest real gains. Given a union with leaders who can control the members, and who are disposed to approach differences in a business spirit, there are few sounder positions for the employer, for agreements honorably carried out dismiss the constant harassments of possible strikes. Such unions exist in dozens of trades in this country, and they are entitled to greater recognition. The time when the employer could ride roughshod over his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of laissez faire on which it was founded. The sooner the fact is recognized, the better for the employer. The sooner some miners' unions develop from the first into the second stage, the more speedily will their organizations secure general respect and influence.

"The crying need of labor unions, and of some employers as well, is education on a fundamental of economics too long disregarded by all classes and especially by the academic economist. When the latter abandon the theory that wages are the result of supply and demand, and recognize that in these days of international flow of labor, commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible. Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in the false belief that they are providing for more labor."

Three years before publishing the Principles of Mining Hoover had collaborated with a a group of authors in the production of a book called Economics of Mining. And three years later, that is in 1912, he privately published, in sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact reproduction of all of its many curious old woodcuts, an English translation of Agricola's "De Re Metallica," the first great treatise on mining and metallurgy, originally published in Latin in 1556, only one hundred years after Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re Metallica" was the standard manual of mining and metallurgy for 180 years. Georgius Agricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, a German of Saxony, who, following the custom of his time used for pen-name the literal Latin equivalents of the words of his German name.

This translation, with its copious added notes of editorial commentary, was the joint work of Hoover and his wife—it was Mrs. Hoover, indeed, who began it—and occupied most of their spare time, especially their evenings—and sometimes nights!—and Sundays, through nearly five years. They had been for some time collecting and delving in old books on China and the Far East and ancient treatises on early mining and metallurgical processes, and had accumulated an unusual collection of such books, ransacking the old bookshops of the world in their quest. In 1902, Mrs. Hoover while looking up some geology in the British Museum Library, stumbled again on Agricola, which she had forgotten since the days she was in Dr. Branner's laboratory. By invoking the services of one of their friends among the old book dealers the Hoovers soon owned a copy. Caught especially by the many curious and only half understandable pictures in it they began to translate bits from it here and there, especially the explanations of the pictures, and in a little while they were lost. Nothing would satisfy them short of making a complete translation. It became an obsession; it was at first their recreation; then because it went very slowly it seemed likely to become their life avocation.

They found an early German translation, which, however, helped them little. The translator had apparently known little of mining and not too much of Latin. They went to Saxony, to the home of Agricola, hoping to get clues to the difficult things in the book by seeing the region and mines which had been under his eyes while writing it, and finding traditions of the mining methods of his time. But it was as if a sponge had been passed over Agricola and his days. Fire had swept over the towns he had known and all the ancient records were gone. The towns, rebuilt, and the mines of which he had written were there, but of him and of the ancient methods he wrote about there was hardly record or even tradition. They went to Freiberg, where has long existed the greatest German school of mines, the greatest mining school in the world, indeed, until the American schools were developed—probably the Germans would not admit even this qualification—and there they found no more to help them than in Agricola's own towns. In fact, the Freiberg professors seemed rather irritated by the advent of these searchers for ancient mining history, for, as the savants explained, the Freiberg methods and machines were all the most modern in the world; there were "no left-overs, no worn-out rubbish of those inefficient ages" around Germany's great school of mines.

So the Hoovers were little rewarded by their pilgrimage to Germany for help in their attempt to resuscitate the Saxon Agricola. But they kept on mining in the big tome and finally, in the fifth year of their devoted spare-time labors they had before them a completed translation.



CHAPTER VII

THE WAR: THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE

From the first day of the World War Herbert Hoover has been a world figure. But much of what he has done and how he has done it is still only hazily known, for all the general public familiarity with his name as head of the Belgian relief work, American food administrator, and, finally, director-general of the American and Allied relief work in Europe after the armistice. The public knows of him as the initiator and head of great organizations with heart in them, which were successfully managed on sound business principles. But it does not yet know the special character of Hoover's own personal participation in them, his original and resourceful contributions to their success, and the formidable obstacles which he had constantly to overcome in making this success possible. There was little that "just happened" which contributed to this success; that which did just happen usually happened wrong. Things came off because ideals were realized by practical method, decision, and driving power. I should like to be able to give the people of America a revealing glimpse, by outline and incident, of all this. And I should like, too, to be able to make clear the pure Americanism of this man; to disclose the basis of belief in the soundness of the American heart and the practical possibilities of American democracy on which Hoover banked in determining his methods and daring his decisions. This belief was the easier to hold inasmuch as he has himself the soundness of character, the fundamental conviction of democracy, and the true philanthropy that he attributes to the average American. He is his own American model.

To call Herbert Hoover "English" as a cheap form of derogation, is to reveal a surprising paucity of invention in criticism. It is also unfair to about as American an American as can be found. The translation of Agricola, an account of which closed our last chapter, stretched over the long time that it did, not alone because Mr. and Mrs. Hoover could give only their spare hours to it, but also because they could turn to it only while they were in London where the needed reference books were available. And their presence in London was so discontinuous that their translating work was much more marked by interruption than continuity. The constant returns to America where there were the New York and San Francisco offices to be looked after personally, and the many trips to the mining properties scattered over the world, limited Hoover's London days to a comparatively small number in each year. A London office was, to be sure, necessary between 1902 and 1914 because of the advantage to a world miner of being close to affairs in the world's center of mining interests. And it was also necessary during Belgian relief days because of its unequaled accessibility, by persons or cable, from all the vital points in the complex international structure of the relief organization. But in all this period of London connection, except in the Belgian relief period, Hoover was a familiar figure in mining circles in both New York and San Francisco, and although rarely able to cast his vote in America he maintained a lively interest in American major governmental affairs.

Hoover kept up, too, an active interest in the development of his alma mater, Stanford University, and especially in its geology and mining engineering department. In 1908 he was asked to join its faculty, and delivered a course of lectures on the principles of mining, which attracted such favorable comment that he repeated it shortly after in condensed form in Columbia University. On the basis of his experience as a university student of mining, and as a successful mine expert and operator, and as an employer of many other university graduates from universities and technical schools Hoover has formed definite conclusions as to what the distinctive character of professional university training for prospective mining engineers should be. It differs from a widely held view.

He believes that the collegiate training should be less practical than fundamental. The attempts, more common a decade ago than now perhaps, to convert schools of mining and departments of mining geology into shops and artificial mines, do not meet with favor in his eyes. Vocational, or professional, training in universities should leave most of the actual practice to be gained in actual experience and work after graduation. If the student is well-grounded in the fundamental science of mining and metallurgy, in geology and chemistry and physics and mechanics, he can quickly pick up the routine methods of practice. And he can do more. He can understand their raison d'etre, and he can modify and adapt them to the varying conditions under which they must be applied. He can, in addition, if he has any originality of mind at all, devise new methods, discover new facts of mining geology—the interior of the earth is by no means a read book as yet—and add not only his normal quota of additional wealth to the world, as a routine worker, but an increment of as yet unrealized possibilities, as an original investigator. In Hoover's own choice of assistants he has selected among men fresh from the universities or technical schools those who have had thoroughly scientific, as contrasted with much technical, or so-called practical, training.

His interest in universities and university administration and methods has always been intense. It has been reciprocated, if his honorary degrees from a dozen American colleges and universities can be assumed to be evidence of this. In 1912 he was made a trustee of Stanford and from the beginning of this trusteeship until now he has taken an active part in the university management, giving it the full benefit of his constructive service. His most recent activity in this connection has concerned itself with the needed increase and standardization of faculty salaries so that for each grade of faculty position there is assured at least a living minimum of salary. He was the originating figure and principal donor of the Stanford Union, a general club-house for students and faculty, which adds materially to the comfort of home-wandering alumni and to the democratic life of the University. In all the great University plant there was no place for a common social meeting-ground for faculty, alumni, and undergraduates. The Union provided it. If Stanford did much for Hoover in the days when he was one of its students, he has loyally repaid his obligation.

But all of these accounts of Hoover's various activities still leave unanswered many questions concerning the more intimate personal characteristics of the man to whom the World War came in August, 1914, with its special call for service. He was then just forty years old, known to mining engineers everywhere and to the alumni and faculty and friends of Stanford University and to a limited group of business acquaintances and personal friends, but with a name then unknown to the world at large. Today no name is more widely known. Today millions of Europeans call him blessed; millions of Americans call him great. My own belief is that he and his work did more to save Europe from complete anarchy after the war than any other influence exerted on its people from the outside, and that without it there was no other sufficient influence either outside or inside which would have prevented this anarchy.

Hoover's kinds of work are many, but his recreations are few. His chief form of exercise—if it is exercise—is motoring. He does not play outdoor games; no golf, tennis, but little walking. He has no system of kicking his legs about in bed or going through calisthenics on rising. And yet he keeps in very good physical condition, at least he keeps in sufficiently good condition to do several men's days' work every day. He has a theory about this which he practices, and which he occasionally explains briefly to those who remonstrate with him about his neglect of exercise. "You have to take exercise," he says, "because you overeat. I do not overeat, and therefore I do not need exercise." It sounds very simple and conclusive; and it seems to work—in his case.

He likes social life, but not society life. He enjoys company but he wants it to mean something. He has little small talk but plenty of significant talk. He saves time by cutting out frills, both business and social. His directness of mental approach to any subject is expressed in his whole manner: his immediate attack in conversation on the essence of the matter, his few words, his quick decisions. He can make these decisions quickly because he has clear policies to guide him. I recall being asked by him to come to breakfast one morning at Stanford after he had been elected trustee, to talk over the matter of faculty standards. His first question to the two or three of us who were there was: What is the figure below which a professor of a given grade (assistant, associate, or full professor) cannot maintain himself here on a basis which will not lower his efficiency in his work or his dignity in the community? We finally agreed on certain figures. "Well," said Hoover, "that must be the minimum salary of the grade."

He knows what he wants to do, and goes straight forward toward doing it; but if difficulty too great intervenes—it really has to be very great—he withdraws for a fresh start and tries another path. I always think of him as outside of a circle in the center of which is his goal. He strikes the circle at one spot; if he can get through, well and good. If not he draws away, moves a little around the circumference and strikes again. This resourcefulness and fertility of method are conspicuous characteristics of him. To that degree he is "diplomatic." But if there is only one way he fights to the extreme along that way. And those of us who have lived through the difficult, the almost impossible, days of Belgian relief, food administration, and general European after-the-war relief, with him, have come to an almost superstitious belief in his capacity to do anything possible to human power.

He has a great gift of lucid exposition. His successful argument with Lloyd George, who began a conference with him on the Belgian relief work strongly opposed to it on grounds of its alleged military disadvantages to the Allies, and closed it by the abrupt statement: "I am convinced; you have my permission," is a conspicuous example, among many, of his way of winning adherence to his plans, on a basis of good grounds and lucid and effective presentation of them. He has no voice for speaking to great audiences, no flowers of rhetoric or familiar platitudes for professional oratory, but there is no more effective living speaker to small groups or conferences around the council table. He is clear and convincing in speech because he is clear and precise in thinking. He is fertile in plan and constructive in method because he has creative imagination.

The first of his war calls to service came just as he was preparing to return to America from London where he had brought his family from California to spend the school vacation of 1914. Their return passage was engaged for the middle of August. But the war came on, and with it his first relief undertaking. It was only the trivial matter—trivial in comparison with his later undertakings—of helping seventy thousand American travelers, stranded at the outbreak of the war, to get home. These people, rich and poor alike, found themselves penniless and helpless because of the sudden moratorium. Letters of credit, travelers' checks, drafts, all were mere printed paper. They needed real money, hotel rooms, steamer passages, and advice. And there was nobody in London, not even the benevolent and most willing but in this respect powerless American ambassador who could help them. At least there seemed none until Hoover transferred the "relief" which had automatically congested about his private offices in the "city" during the first two days to larger headquarters in the Hotel Savoy. He gathered together all his available money and that of American friends and opened a unique bank which had no depositors and took in no money, but continuously gave it out against personal checks signed by unknown but American-looking people on unknown banks in Walla Walla and Fresno and Grand Rapids and Dubuque and Emporia and New Bedford. And he found rooms in hotels and passage on steamers, first-class, second-class or steerage, as happened to be possible. Now on all these checks and promises to pay, just $250 failed to be realized by the man who took a risk on American honesty to the extent of several hundred thousand dollars.

Some of the incidents of this "relief" were pathetic, and some were comic. One day the banker and his staff, which was composed of his wife and their friends, were startled by the apparition in the front office of a group of American plains Indians, Blackfeet and Sioux, all in the most Fenimore Cooperish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins, war-paint and tomahawks. They had been part of a Wild West show and menagerie caught by the war's outbreak in Austria, and had, after incredible experiences, made their way out, dropping animals and baggage as they progressed, until they had with them only what they had on, which in order to save the most valuable part of their portable furniture, was their most elaborate costumes. They had got to London, but to do it they had used up the last penny and the last thing they could sell or pawn except their clothes, which they had to wear to cover their red skins. Hoover's American bank saw these original Americans off, with joyful whoopings of gratitude, for Wyoming.

But the work was not limited to lending the barely necessary funds to those who wished to borrow. He raised a charitable fund among these same friends for caring for the really destitute ones until other relief could come. This came in the shape of the American Government's "ship of gold," the battle-ship Tennessee, sent over to the rescue. Hoover was then asked by Ambassador Page and the Army officers in charge of the London consignment of this gold to persuade his volunteer committee to continue their labors during its distribution. With this money available all who were able to produce proof of American citizenship could be given whatever was necessary to enable them to reach their own country.

And then came the next insistent call for help. And in listening to it, and, with swift decision, undertaking to respond to it, Herbert Hoover launched himself, without in any degree realizing it, on a career of public service and corresponding abnegation of private business and self-interest, that was to last all through the war and through the armistice period, and is today still going on. In all this period of war and after-war service he has received no salary from government or relief organizations but, on the contrary, has given up a large income as expert mining engineer and director of mining companies. In addition, he has paid out a large sum for personal expenses incurred in connection with the work.

The call was for the relief of Belgium. I know the story of Hoover in his relation to the relief of Belgium very well because I became one of his helpers in it soon after the war began and remained in it until the end. But it is a hard story to tell; there is too much of it. My special duties were of a kind to keep me constantly in touch with "the Chief," and I was able to realize, as only a few others were, the load of nerve-racking responsibility and herculean labor carried by him behind the more open scene of the public money-gathering, food-buying and transporting, and daily feeding of the ten million imprisoned people of occupied Belgium and France. In the relief of these helpless peoples Hoover put, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time on any such enormous scale and with such outstanding success, philanthropy on a basis of what dear old Horace Fletcher, shut up with us in Belgium during the Occupation, would permit to be referred to by no other phrase than the somewhat hackneyed one of "engineering efficiency," unless we would use a new word for it which he coined. In fact he used the new word "Hooverizing" as a synonym for efficiency with a heart in it, two years before it became familiar in America with another meaning. And I prefer his meaning of the word to that of the food-saving meaning with which we became familiar in Food Administration days.



CHAPTER VIII

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; ORGANIZATION AND DIPLOMATIC DIFFICULTIES

Despite the general popular knowledge that there was a relief of Belgium and that Hoover was its organizer and directing head, there still seems to be, if I may judge by the questions often asked me, no very wide knowledge of just why there had to be such relief of Belgium and how Herbert Hoover came to undertake it. A fairly full answer to these queries makes a proper introduction to any account, however brief, of his participation in this extraordinary part of the history of the war.

The World War began, as we all most vividly remember, with the successful, although briefly but most importantly delayed invasion of Belgium. And this invasion resulted in producing very promptly not only a situation appalling in its immediate realization, but one of even more terrifying possibilities for the near future. For through the haze of the smoke-clouds from burning towns and above the rattle of the machine guns in Dinant and Louvain could be seen the hovering specter of starvation and heard the wailing of hungry children. And how the specter was to be made to pass and the children to hush their cries was soon the problem of all problems for Belgium.

Within ten weeks after the first shots of the War all of Belgium except that dreary little stretch of sand and swamp in the northwestern corner of it that for over four years was all of the Kingdom of Belgium under the rule of King Albert, was not only in the hands of a brutal enemy but was enclosed and shut away from the rest of the world by a rigid ring of steel. Not only did the Germans maintain a ring of bayonets and electrified wire fence—this latter along the Belgian-Dutch frontier—around it, but the Allies, recognizing that for all practical purposes, Occupied Belgium was now German territory, had to include it in their blockade of the German coast. Thus no persons or supplies could pass in or out of Belgium except under extraordinary circumstances, such as a special permission from both Germany and Allies or a daring and almost impossible blockade-running.

Now Belgium is not, as America is, self-sustaining as to food. If an enemy could completely blockade us, we could go on living indefinitely on the food we produce. But Belgium could not; nor could England or France or Italy. Belgium is not primarily an agricultural country, despite the fact that what agriculture it does have is the most intensive and highly developed in Europe. It is an industrial country, the most highly industrialized in Europe, with only one sixth of its people supporting themselves by agriculture. It depends upon constant importations for fifty per cent of its general food needs and seventy-five per cent of its needed food-grains.

The ring of steel about Belgium, then, if not promptly broken, plainly meant starvation. The imprisoned Belgians saw, with the passing days, their little piles of stored food supplies get lower. They had immediately begun rationing themselves. The Government and cities had taken possession of such small food stocks as had not been seized by the Germans for their armies, and were treating them as a common supply for all the people. They distributed this food as well as they could during a reign of terror with all railways and motors controlled by their conquerors. They lived in those first weeks on little food but much hope. For were not their powerful protectors, the French and English, very quickly going to drive the invaders back and out of their country? But it soon became apparent that it was the Allied armies that were being driven not only out of Belgium but farther and farther back into France. So the Allies could do nothing, and the Germans would do nothing to help them. Indeed, everything the Germans did was to make matters worse. There was only one hope; they must have food from outside sources, and to do this they must have recourse to some powerful neutral help.

Belgium, and particularly Brussels, has always had its American colony. And it was to these Americans that Belgium turned for help. Many members of the colony left as soon after the war began as they could, but some, headed by Minister Brand Whitlock, remained. When the Belgian court left Brussels for Antwerp, and later for Le Havre, part of the diplomatic corps followed it, but a smaller part stayed in Brussels to occupy for the rest of the war a most peculiar position. Mr. Whitlock elected to stay. It was a fortunate election for the Belgians. Also it meant many things, most of them interesting, for the sympathetic Minister.

When the American expatriates in Belgium who wished to leave after the war began, applied to Minister Whitlock for help to become repatriates, he called to his assistance certain American engineers and business men then resident in Brussels, notably Messrs. Daniel Heineman, Millard Shaler, and William Hulse. He also had the very effective help of his First Secretary of Legation, Mr. Hugh Gibson, now our Minister to Poland. These men were able to arrange the financial difficulties of the fleeing Americans despite closed banks, disappearing currency, and general financial paralysis. When this was finished they readily turned to the work of helping the Belgians, the more readily because they were the right sort of Americans.

Their first effort, in cooeperation with the burgomaster of Brussels and a group of Brussels business men, was the formation of a Central Committee of Assistance and Provisioning, under the patronage of the Ministers of the United States and Spain (Mr. Whitlock and the Marques de Villalobar). This committee was first active in the internal measures for relief already referred to, but soon finding that the shipping about over the land of the rapidly disappearing food stocks of the country and the special assistance of the destitute and out-of-work—the destruction of factories and the cessation of the incoming of raw materials had already thrown tens of thousands of men out of employment—must be replaced by a more radical relief, this committee resolved to approach the Germans for permission to attempt to bring in food supplies from outside the country.

Burgomaster Max had already written on September 7 to Major General Luettwitz, the German Military Governor of Brussels, asking for permission to import foodstuffs through the Holland-Belgium border, and the city authorities of Charleroi had also begun negotiation with the German authorities in their province (Hainaut) to the same end, but little attention had been paid to these requests. Therefore the Americans of the committee decided, as neutrals, to take up personally with the German military authorities the matter of arranging imports.

A general permission for the importation of foodstuffs into Belgium by way of the Dutch frontier was finally obtained from the German authorities in Belgium, together with their guarantee that all such imported food would be entirely free from requisition by the German army. Also, a special permission was accorded to Mr. Shaler to go to Holland, and, if necessary, to England to try to arrange for obtaining and transporting to Belgium certain kinds and quantities of foodstuffs. But no money could be sent out of Belgium to pay for them, except a first small amount which Mr. Shaler was allowed to take with him.

In Holland, Mr. Shaler found the Dutch government quite willing to allow foodstuffs to pass through Holland for Belgium, but it asked him to try to arrange to find the supplies in England. Holland already saw that she would need to hold all of her food supplies for her own people. So Shaler went on to England. Here he tried to interest influential Americans in Belgium's great need, and, through Edgar Rickard, an American engineer, he was introduced to Herbert Hoover.

This brings us to Hoover's connection with the relief of Belgium. But there was necessary certain official governmental interest on the part of America and the Allies before anybody could really do much of anything. Hoover therefore introduced Shaler to Dr. Page, the American Ambassador, a man of heart, decision, and prompt action. This was on October 7. A few days before, on September 29, to be exact, Shaler together with Hugh Gibson, the Secretary of the American Legation in Brussels who had followed Shaler to London, had seen Count Lalaing, the Belgian minister to England, and explained to him the situation inside of Belgium. They also handed him a memorandum pointing out that there was needed a permit from the British Government allowing the immediate exportation of about 2,500 tons of wheat, rice, beans, and peas to Belgium. Mr. Shaler had brought with him from Brussels money provided by the Belgian Comite Central sufficient to purchase about half this amount of foodstuffs.

The Belgian Minister transmitted the request for a permit to the British Government on October 1. On October 6 he received a reply which he, in turn, transmitted to the American Ambassador in London, Mr. Page. This reply from the British Government gave permission to export foodstuffs from England through Holland into Belgium, under the German guarantees that had previously been obtained by Mr. Heineman's committee, on the condition that the American Ambassador in London, or Americans representing him, would ship the foodstuffs from England, consigned to the American Minister in Brussels; that each sack of grain should be plainly marked accordingly, and that the foodstuffs should be distributed under American control solely to the Belgian civil population.

On October 7, the day that Hoover had taken Shaler to the American Embassy and they had talked matters over with Mr. Page, the Ambassador cabled to Washington outlining the British Government's authorization and suggesting that, if the American Government was in accord with the whole matter as far as it had gone, it should secure the approval of the German Government. After a lapse of four or five days, Ambassador Page received a reply from Washington in which it was stated that the American Government had taken the matter up with Berlin on October 8.

After an exchange of telegrams between Brussels, London, Washington, and Berlin, Ambassador Page was informed on October 18 by Ambassador Gerard, then American Ambassador in Berlin, that the German Government agreed to the arrangement, and the following day confirmation of this was received from Washington.

Sometime during the course of these negotiations Ambassador Page and the Belgian authorities formally asked Hoover to take on the task of organizing the relief work, if the diplomatic arrangements came to a satisfactory conclusion. His sympathetic and successful work in looking after the stranded Americans, all done under the appreciative eyes of the American Ambassador, had recommended him as the logical head of the new and larger humanitarian effort. Hoover had agreed, and his first formal step, taken on October 10, in organizing the work, was to enlist the existing American Relief Committee, whose work was then practically over, in the new undertaking. He amalgamated its principal membership with the Americans in Brussels, and on October 13, issued in the name of this committee an appeal to the American people to consolidate all Belgian relief funds and place them in the hands of the committee for disposal. At the same time Minister Whitlock cabled an appeal to President Wilson to call on America for aid in the relief of Belgium.

Between October 10 and 16 it was determined by Ambassador Page and Mr. Hoover that it was desirable to set up a wholly new neutral organization. Hoover enlisted the support of Messrs. John B. White, Millard Hunsiker, Edgar Rickard, J. F. Lucey, and Clarence Graff, all American engineers and business men then in London, and these men, together with Messrs. Shaler and Hugh Gibson, thereupon organized, and on October 22 formally launched, "The American Commission for Relief in Belgium," with Hoover as its active head, with the title of chairman, Ambassador Page and Ministers Van Dyke and Whitlock, in The Hague and Brussels, respectively, were the organization's honorary chairmen. A few days afterward, at the suggestion of Minister Whitlock, Senor Don Merry del Val, the Spanish Ambassador in London, and Marques de Villalobar, the Spanish Minister in Brussels, both of whom had been consulted in the arrangements in Belgium and London, were added to the list of honorary chairmen. And, a little later, there were added the names of Mr. Gerard, the American Ambassador at Berlin, Mr. Sharp, our Ambassador at Paris, and Jongkeer de Weede, the Dutch Minister to the Belgian Government at Le Havre where it had taken refuge. At the same time the name of the Commission was modified by dropping from it the word "American" in deference to the official connection of the Spanish diplomats with it. The new organization thus became styled "The Commission for Relief in Belgium," which remained its official title through its existence. This name was promptly reduced, in practical use by its members, with characteristic American brevity, to "C. R. B.," which, pronounced "tsay-er-bay," was also soon the one most widely used in Belgium and Occupied France by Belgian, French, and Germans alike.

I have given this account of the organization and status of the Commission in so much detail because it reveals its imposing official appearance which was of inestimable value to it in carrying on its running diplomatic difficulties all through the war. The official patronage of the three neutral governments, American, Spanish and Dutch, gave us great strength in facing the repeated assaults on our existence and the constant interference with our work by German officials and officers. I have earlier used the phrase "satisfactory conclusion of diplomatic arrangements." There never was, in the whole history of the Commission, any satisfactory conclusion of such arrangements; there were sufficiently satisfactory conditions to enable the work to go on effectively but there was always serious diplomatic difficulty. Ministers Whitlock and Villalobar, our "protecting Ministers" in Brussels, had to bear much of the brunt of the difficulties, but the Commission itself grew to have almost the diplomatic standing of an independent nation, its chairman and the successive resident directors in Brussels acting constantly as unofficial but accepted intermediaries between the Allies and the Germans.

The "C. R. B." was organized. It had its imposing list of diplomatic personages. It had a chairman and secretary and treasurer and all the rest. But to feed the clamoring Belgians it had to have food. To have food it had to have money, much money, and with this money food in large quantity had to be obtained in a world already being ransacked by the purchasing agents of France and England seeking the stocks that these countries knew would soon be necessary to meet the growing demands of their armies and civilians drawn from production into the great game of destruction. Once obtained, the food had to be transported overseas and through the mine-strewn Channel to Rotterdam, the nearest open port of Belgium, and thence by canals and railways into the starving country and its use there absolutely restricted to the civil population. Finally, the feeding of Belgium had to begin immediately and arrangements had to be made to keep it up indefinitely. The war was not to be a short one; that was already plain. It was up to Hoover to get busy, very busy.

The first officials of the C. R. B. and all the men who came into it later, agree on one thing. We relied confidently on our chairman to organize, to drive, to make the impossible things possible. We did our best to carry out what it was our task to do. If we had ideas and suggestions they were welcomed by him. If good they were adopted. But principally we worked as we were told for a man who worked harder than any of us, and who planned most of the work for himself and all of us.

He had the vision. He saw from the first that the relief of Belgium would be a large job; it proved to be a gigantic one. He saw that all America would have to be behind us; indeed that the whole humanitarian world would have to back us up, not merely in funds but in moral support. For the military logic of the situation was only half with us; it was half against us. The British Admiralty, trying to blockade Germany completely, saw in the feeding of ten million Belgians and French in German-occupied territory a relief to the occupiers who would, by the accepted rules of the game, have to feed these people from their own food supplies. The fact that the Germans declared from the first that they never would do this and in every test proved that they would not, was hard to drive home to the Admiralty and to many amateur English strategists safely far from the sufferings of the hungering Belgians.

On the other hand other influential governmental officials, notably the Prime Minister and the heads of the Foreign Office, saw in the Allied help for these people the only means to prevent them from saving their lives in the one other way possible to them, that is, by working for the Germans. Fathers of families, however patriotic, cannot see their wives and children starve to death when rescue is possible. And the Germans offered this rescue to them all the time. Never a day in all the four years when German placards offering food and money for their work did not stare in the faces the five hundred thousand idle skilled Belgian workmen and the other hundreds of thousands of unskilled ones shut up in the country.

Germany, also, had two opinions about Belgian relief. There were zu Reventlow and his great party of jingoes who cried from beginning to end: Kick out these American spies; make an end of this soft-heartedness. Here we have ten million Allied hostages in our hands. Let us say to England and France and the refugee Belgian cabinet at Le Havre: Your people may eat what they now have; it will last them a month or two; then they shall not have a mouthful from Germany or anywhere else unless you give up the blockade and open the ports of Belgium and Germany alike to incoming foods.

On the other side were von Bissing and his German governing staff in Belgium, together with most of the men of the military General Staff at Great Headquarters. Von Bissing tried, in his heavy, stupid way, to placate the Belgians; that was part of his policy. So he would offer them food—always for work—with one hand, while he gave them a slap with the other. He wanted Belgium to be tranquil. He did not want to have openly to machine-gun starving mobs in the cities, however many unfortunates he allowed to be quietly carried out to the Tir National at gray dawn to stand for one terrible moment before the ruthless firing squad. And the hard-headed men of the General Staff knew that starving people do not lie down quietly and die. All the northern lines of communication between the west front and Germany ran through the countries of these ten million imprisoned French and Belgians. Even without arms they could make much trouble for the guards of bridges and railways in their dying struggles. At least it would require many soldiers to kill them fast enough to prevent it. And the soldiers, all of them, were needed in the trenches. In addition the German General Staff earnestly desired and hoped up to the very last that America would keep out of the war. And these extraordinary Americans in Belgium seemed to have all of America behind them; that is what the great relief propaganda and the imposing list of diplomatic personages on the C. R. B. list were partly for. Hoover had realized from the beginning what this would mean. "No," said the higher German officials, "it will not do to interfere too much with these quixotic Americans."

But the Germans, most of them at least, never really understood us. One day as Hoover was finishing a conversation with the head of the German Pass-Zentral in Brussels, trying to arrange for a less vexing and delaying method of granting passes for the movements of our men, the German officer said: "Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to man, what do you get out of all this? You are not doing all this for nothing, surely." And a little later, at a dinner at the Great Headquarters to which I had been invited by one of the chief officers of the General Staff, he said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's business?" I could only tell him that it was going as well as any business could that made no profits for anybody in it.

It was impressive to see Hoover in the crises. We expected a major crisis once a month and a minor one every week. We were rarely disappointed in our expectations. I may describe, for illustration, such a major crisis, a very major one, which came in August, 1916. The Commission had been making a hard fight all summer for two imperatively needed concessions from the Germans. We wanted the General Staff to turn over to us for the civil population a larger proportion of the 1916 native crop of Occupied France than we had had from the 1915 crop. And we wanted some special food for the 600,000 French children in addition to the regular program imported from overseas. We sorely needed fresh meat, butter, milk and eggs for them and we had discovered that Holland would sell us certain quantities of these foods. But we had to have the special permission of both the Allies and Germany to bring them in.

Hoover, working in London, obtained the Allied consent. But the Germans were holding back. I was pressing the General Staff at Great Headquarters at Charleville and von Bissing's government at Brussels. Their reasons for holding back finally appeared. Germany looked on Holland as a storehouse of food which might some time, in some way, despite Allied pressure on the Dutch Government, become available to Germany. Although the French children were suffering terribly, and ceasing all growth and development for lack of the tissue-building foods, the Germans preferred not to let us help them with the Dutch food but to cling to their long chance of sometime getting it for themselves.