Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-09-18
HooVER'S PRESIDENTIAL BOOM
is A SIGN OF GREAT PROMISE
One Man Who Actually Knows the Made
Over World With Which We Shall
Have to Deal

signs. But every American with q
decent sense of the requirements of the
/ hour in Washington felt instinctjvely
! that he was witnessing a political event
of the first magnitude. Hoover talked Of
as only a man could talk who was re
turned from the very center of the whirl-
wind. He made the conventional patter
Of political mandarins seem incredibly
poor and mean. There was no hatred in
the man, no lies, no piffie, no propaganda
for anything or anybody. He had a great
deal to say of bolshevism, yet he uttered
no word of hatred for the masses of those
whom we like to call Reds. He saw only
the failure in Russia that is as terrible
and almost as pitiful as the war itself.
For once at least the country had the
opportunity to glimpse the Russia and
the Eurone of today as it appears to
mind that is free and practical and
wisc--and yet compassionate. 1t re-
NAMED for this rcsourceful American to
say all that need be said Of present-day
radicalism in practice when he told his
audience without emotion that the Old
World is no longer able to feed or Clothe
itself. There are now about 100000 900
people in Europe who ultimately must
die if conditions do not change, because
the lcssencd production that has fol-
lowed a revolution against work leaves
them without the essential means of life.
Lies proved during the war to be the
most futile and at the same time the most
dangerous of all weapons. 1t is natural
to suppose that, after the experience of
the past few years, the world would be
sick of falsehood and pretense. Yet it is
with idiotic propaganda that European
nations are trying to fight bolshevism,
while the simple and far more terrible
truth. as Hoover was able to perceive it,
is disregarded.
To Hoover, bolshevism is but an Incl
dent in the larger question of Europe.
The Russians were told that they would
be guided to the millennium. But the
"idealists and criminals, the murderers
and intellectual dilettanti" who led them
destroyed more than government. They
eliminated the impulse to individual
effort and they Systematically hindered
the wholesome and indispensable exer-
else of individual initiative. Doing that
they did the worst thing conceivable for
civilization.
And so Russia has become place in
which firing squads, starvation, pes
thence, new and infinitely cruel class
consciousness and isolated groups ex-
alted by new and undreamed of privi-
leges are necessary to sustain delusions
of freedom among tormented Millions.
1t is the spread of this fundamental
social disease, not its transient effects in
one country, that concerns the man who
was privileged to study its actual reac-
tions on the life of Europe.
If Leninism were to become by any
means general in Europe, Europe would
merely perish of hunger within year
or live by the charity of the rest of the
world That in fact, is the alternative
that faces some of the smaller nations
now. Yet Hoover is not willing to ac-
cept the conventional view and regard
Russia as country populated by danger
Gus maniacs. He sees Russians rather
as people whom the ages sinned against
and left at disadvantage.
To him the ferment in all of Europe
is traceable directly to centuries Of
social and political wrongs" inflicted on
the people by ignorant cliques in and out
of government. And he insisted that it is
idle to suppose that you can use force to
overcome a state of mind.
1t is not because of the magnificent
nature of his mission in Europe or be-
cause of the singular ability with which
it was directed that Hoover appeals in
this instance to the imagination of the
whole country. 1t is rather because he
has tried to make it plain that the people
of the United States, through their great
ness of heart and by their own resource
funess, must maintain the dignity and
validity of their own inherited institu-
tions-and yet find a means to correct
the economic and social disorders that
the Bolshevists and Socialists have been
attacking in vast experiments that tend
certainly to unthinkable disaster in many
parts of the world.
This is brave way of looking at the
whole matter. Hoover, who did miracles
in Europe, appears to feel certafn that
there is in the existing rAmerican political
and economic system a means 70 meet
the challenge of the times nDbly and sue
cessfully. What he appears TO have in
mind is the better education of all who
work with their hands in the inexorable
truths of economic theory. He is think
ing, too, of the better education of those
who direct and organize the industries.
Radicalism as he found it everywhere in
Europe was intellectually and econom-
ically bankrupt. And as America found
way to serve Europe in material way,
it must find a means to serve Europe by
its mind and by its spirit in a greater
crisis.
Such an analysis as this lifts the
league -of-nations issue to a new plane
altogether. The second American inter-