their affairs and take a summer trip to Washington at a word of suggestion? By what magic has the Food Administration entered twelve million or more American homes with its message of saving and service in the kitchen? Of course, the plea of patriotism is all powerful. Americans were anxious to "do their bit" and they were glad to start with this slightest and most intimate bit of all. And the plea for the starving soldiers in Europe was very potent indeed. But with all honor to these higher if vaguer forces there were other conditions of a more immediate nature which were urging the people to conform. The disorganization of all systems of American life, social, economic and intellectual, made possible reorganizations which would have been inconceivable under normal conditions. Men were looking for leaders of clear vision and ready execution upon whose judgment they could depend. They were seeking haven from markets shattered and distracted by the threat of war and by the practices of the speculator.

By the time the Lever Bill was finally passed and signed on August 10 the American people had accepted the Food Administration. It was the first agency to awaken their imaginations to the meaning of the war and to their obligations in it. It offered them their first opportunity of service and self-sacrifice. The management of the Administration gave them confidence in the firm hand and ready wits in control. While other men found their way hampered by criticism and suspicion Mr. Hoover's greatest danger lay in the backfire which would inevitably follow a too great popularity. In insisting that the Food Administration should be looked upon as an institution and not as a projection of a personality he at the same time protected himself against the danger of becoming a fetish and secured that variety of expert service and outlook that permitted the Administration to turn a fresh face to its many problems.

The Food Control Law is explicit in forbidding certain practices. It also is explicit in providing certain power. And yet neither its prohibitions nor its commands are of such a nature as to provide the utmost of force as a legal mandate apart from the support of public opinion. The punishments provided for the violations of the law are light. For one large class of illegal practices, extortion on the part of retailers, no punishment is provided. The provisions against hoarding, speculation and unjust profits are of such a nature

as to be effective only through coöperation with the trades concerned. In one way the fragility of the law as a mandatory instrument was advantageous. It brought into play in the operation of the law those forces of patriotism released by the war whose expression was more effective than any amount of arbitrary authority.

The system of license is to be explained as the means whereby the voluntary coöperation of the food trades of the country is moulded into the execution of the national will as revealed in the Food Control Law and in the decrees of the Food Administration. The license system enlists the patriotic majority for the control of the recalcitrant or seditious minority. It is more a system of convenient administration than of governmental control. By means of the license system the trade is protected as well as is the Government. It provides standards where standards are much needed. It relieves of the anxiety of competition under unfair conditions. The punishments provided for the violation of the license provisions are of a new and interesting order. While backed by the power to take criminal action, punishments have been as a rule of that more direct order that attacks the licensee's right to do business. Revocation of license is a much more serious punishment than a fine and much more easy of application.

No problem in the first year of the Food Administration's history has involved considerations of such subtle and far-reaching importance as the matter of price-fixing. Aside from the inherent difficulties of the subject as an economic doctrine, the Food Law was so constructed and hedged about as further to confuse the issues of the Administration in its attitude toward this question. In other words, the Food Administration both is and is not at the same time a pricefixing body. It cannot escape taking both sides of the road with the inevitable disadvantages that come to one who travels in this way.

By Section 14 of the Lever Bill, which became the Food Control Law, the President is authorized from time to time to determine and fix a reasonable guaranteed price for wheat, and this Section itself fixes the price for the crop of 1918 at not less than $2.00 per bushel at the principal interior primary markets. Pursuant to this Section the President has, by two separate decrees, set the price of 1917 wheat and of the 1918 crop at $2.20 per bushel. Section 11 of the Law

authorizes the President to purchase and store and sell wheat and flour, meal, beans and potatoes. Manifestly any purchase so made by the Government would in effect fix the price. Aside from these delegations of power no authority is given by the Food Control Law to fix prices. And yet a study of the operations of these provisions as well as a regard for the implications of other functions of the Food Administration carry the conviction that price-fixing is a necessary and inescapable corollary of the effective prosecution of the Food Administration programme.

Every argument of policy and inclination warned the Food Administrator against entering the field of price-fixing. That field is a melancholy and trackless morass, which no one would enter with his eyes open unless empowered from Above to "remake the sorry scheme of things entire." Mr. Hoover has been explicit in repudiating the idea that the Food Administration is a price-fixing body. On August 25, 1917, this statement was issued: "Mr. Hoover wishes to state emphatically that there is no foundation for any statement that the Food Administration has any intention to fix prices of beef or pork products." On November 7 of the same year it was announced by his authority: "The Food Control Act does not authorize the Food Administration to fix prices to the grower of beans, but it has the responsibility of preventing the various agencies in distribution from exacting unreasonable profits." Again on February 25, 1918, Mr. Hoover said: "I wish to say at once and emphatically that the Food Administration is not a price-fixing body, except with regard to certain commodities which to-day are dominated by wholly abnormal over-seas commercial relations."

We see in these three quotations the clear inclination of the Food Administrator, which undoubtedly reflected the intent of Congress, to interpret the duties of the Food Administration as precluding the powers of price-fixing. And yet, though the inclination is clear, in no one of these quotations, nor in any other utterance of the Food Administrator or his authorized agents, has it been said that the Food Administration is not and cannot under any circumstances be a price-fixing body. Much as an executive might wish to take such a position, the clear logic of the case is against him. There are many evidences that price-fixing has come to lodge itself as an unwelcome factor in the programme of the Food

Administration. Price-fixing came to be a fact even while avoided as a theory, and eventually it has become necessary to face it, if not to accept it, even as a theory.

What are the evidences that price-fixing is essentially involved in the programme of the Food Administration? One piece of evidence lies in the fact that when once you have fixed the price of one commodity the condition is bound to be reflected in other commodities. Price-fixing in one commodity is, in fact, the monetization of that commodity, whereby it is made the standard of value of all other commodities. In fixing the price of wheat Congress fixed as well, though not so explicitly, the price of corn, and hogs, and sugar beets. The determining and administering of these prices it left to the Food Administration.

A further evidence that the Food Administration could not avoid the onus of price-fixing lies in the reasons for which the Administration was brought into existence and the services it was created to perform. The Food Administration is a war agency. Its chief purpose is the feeding of warring nations, our own nation and the Allies. All its other activities, its conservation, its stabilization of trade processes, its encouragement of production, are tributary to the one purpose of segregating stocks of food for the effective prosecution of the war. This latter purpose, in fact, takes the Food Administration directly or indirectly into the market. As the agent and correspondent of the Army, the Navy, the Allies and the Neutrals in the American food markets the Food Administration wields a power of purchase which, indiscriminately handled, would amount to cornering the market.

In such a situation a double set of responsibilities arise, the responsibility toward its clients, the Army, Navy, and Allied and Neutral nations, and responsibility toward the mass of the American people, with whom, in fact, the Food Administration, in its capacity as agent, would be coming into competition and "bulling" the market. In fact, these responsibilities are one, but unless their dual nature is accepted the interests of the one or the other will soon be found to suffer. These responsibilities can be met only in case the Food Administration accepts fully the powers its commanding place in the market awards to it as opportunities for service to the producer and the consumer.

Its responsibility toward the official agencies of the war

the Food Administration accepted through the establishment of a Division of Coördination of purchase which works in companionship with the Federal Trade Board and the interested purchasing agencies. To each of these the Food Administration helps to allocate stocks of foods; it helps further by distributing orders equitably to different trade agencies. But the Food Administration cannot stop there. This is but the beginning of its service and its responsibilty. Beyond the supplying of stocks to official buyers it has the far-reaching responsibility of maintaining a steady and increasing flow from the producers and of maintaining the morale and the nutrition of the mass of the population which is supporting the war. In such a case as this, no mere academic fear of the bogy of price-fixing will prevent the Administration from seizing the opportunity for service that lies near at home. As the world's largest buyer the Food Administration does in fact control prices. The only question will be whether these are to be controlled broadly for the interest of the people and the encouragement of production, or narrowly for the presumable interest only of the official buyers.

To such a question as this there can be only one answer. If that answer is damned by the title of "price-fixing" the critic must make the most of it. The power by which the Government fixes the price for, say, ten per cent of the nation's produce cannot be limited in its influence to that ten per cent. If the price is too low it will discourage production and must be made up by the ninety per cent. If ten per cent of the products of the country are drawn arbitrarily from the markets the disorganization and the famine that follow cannot be justified by the apology that the Government had not fixed prices. If the price paid for hogs is not adjusted to the price paid for corn, the depletion of livestock in the pen will not make up for the polite economic record of those responsible for the purchases. We have come into new days and we are wielding forces of a world magnitude. By the sudden stress of circumstances we have been compelled to assume duties and functions which could never have been tified by the consideration of pre-war times.

Vhat have been the results of the campaign for general conservation? Around this question revolve some of the perplexities of the Food Administration. If success e campaign for conservation is to be measured alone by quantities of food saved by the American people out of