over seven hundred
million dollars' worth of food, with the final return of almost all of
the original hundred million to the United States Government (if not in
actual cash, at least in the form of government obligations), will be
told in a later chapter. Also how it was arranged, without calling on
the United States Government for further advances, that the feeding of
the millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe could go on as it is
now actually going on every day under Hoover's direction, until the time
arrives, some time this summer, when it can be wholly taken over by the
new governments.

But just now I want to tell another story.

CHAPTER II

THE CHILD AND BOY

The account of Mr. Hoover's sympathetic interest in the child sufferers
from the Great War, and of his active and effective work on their
behalf, makes one wonder about his own childhood. He is not so old that
his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did
mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South.
He was not born in the South, nor of parents actually afflicted by
poverty, and did not spend his early days in any of the comparatively
few places in America, such as the congested great city quarters and
industrial agglomerations of poor and ignorant foreign working-people,
where real child distress is common; so he certainly did not, as a
growing child, have his ears filled with tales of child suffering, or
with the actual crying of hungry children.

There was one outstanding fact, however, in his relations as a child to
the world and to the people most closely about him, which may have had
its influence in making him especially susceptible to the sight of child
misfortune. This is the fact that he, like many of his later wards in
Europe, was orphaned at an early age. But he was by no means a neglected
orphan. So I hardly think that his own personal experience as an orphan
is a sufficient explanation of the passionate interest in the special
fate of the children, which he displayed from the beginning of the war
to its end.

Nor can the explanation lie in the coldly reasoned conclusion that the
most valuable relief to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its
very existence as a human group is threatened, is to let whatever
mortality is unavoidable fall chiefly to the old and the adult infirm
for the sake of saving the next generation on which alone the future
existence of the group d