The Flagellafor

Herbert Hoover trudged wearily through Warsaw's ruins, soup kitchens, orphans' homes. In Hoover Square, Poland's grateful tribute to him after World War I, he saw how his statue had been destroyed by German grenades. But the heavy-jowled old man, who had brought succor to Europe a quarter-century ago, was still building something more substantial than a marble monument. Restlessly, unsparing of his age, he scourged the world's conscience.

He and his commission investigating European food conditions had come up from hungry Italy. But not even Italy's plight was as dire as that of Poland. "This is the worst situation we have seen so far," he said to the world. "The Polish people are digging themselves out of the greatest political, intellectual and moral destruc tion ever known. . . . A Polish woman remarked to me today, 'We are weary of dying'. . . . It is a forbidding picture, but with food until the next harvest, Poland can rise again." The Responsibility. From Warsaw Hoover hurried on to Helsinki, then to London. A continent's anguish cried out through him as he spoke to an international emergency conference on European grain supplies: "Hunger sits at the table thrice daily in hundreds of millions of homes. . . . The world uses the words 'starvation' and 'famine' very loosely; some travelers glibly report there is now widespread death-dealing famine on the Continent of Europe. In modern civilization whole nations do not lie down and die. The casual observers do not realize that famine would have already struck great groups and classes were it not for past overseas supplies and that it is in evitable, unless we land for the next months every ton of overseas food that we can summon. And nothing is more preposterous than the opinions of travelers on the Continent who live on black-market food at prices out of reach of 99% of the people." Hoover called the present crisis "the most critical food period in all history.

. . . From the Russian frontier to the Channel, there are today 20 millions of children . . . badly undernourished . . . steadily developing tuberculosis, rickets, anemia and other diseases of subnormal feeding. Unless they are better fed many will die and others . . . will furnish more malevolents. . . . The responsibility rests heavily upon the world. . . ."

* For more news of malnutrition, see MEDICINE.

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