[By arrangement with The London Chronicle.]

One of the finest moral actions in this war has been done by America. It is action on a gigantic scale, and yet of a directly personal character. Insufficient publicity, I think, has been given to this action.

Is it realized by the people of this country that America has already saved us from capitulating to the enemy? Either we should have been forced into this surrender (with our armies unbroken and our munitions of war unexhausted) or we should at this moment be struggling to live and work and fight on one-third of our present rations.

America is sending to these islands almost two-thirds of our food supplies. Sixty-five per cent. of the essential foodstuffs eaten by the British citizen comes to him from the American Continent. This in itself is something which calls for our lively gratitude. But there is a quality in the action of America which should intensify our gratitude. For these American supplies, essential to our health and safety, represent in very large measure the personal and voluntary self-sacrifice of the individual American citizen. They are not crumbs from the table of Dives. They are not the commandeered supplies of an autocratic Government. They represent, rather, the kindly, difficult, and entirely willing self-sacrifice of a whole nation, the vast majority of whom are working people.

There is only one altar for this act of sacrifice—it is the table of the American working classes. And the rite is performed by men, women, and children, at every meal of the day, day after day, week after week.

This act of self-sacrifice, let us remember, is made in the midst of plenty. Well might the American housewife ask why she should deprive her children of food, why she should institute wheatless and meatless days, when all about her there is a visible superabundance of these things. Questions such as this are natural enough on the other side of the Atlantic, and on the other side of the American continent, 5,000 miles away from the battlefields of France.

But the citizens of America do not ask such questions. With a cheerfulness and a courage which are as vigorous as their industry, and with a moral earnestness which is by far the greatest demonstration America has yet given to the world of American character, these people so far away from us on the other side of the Atlantic have willingly and with no coercion by the State denied themselves for the sake of the Entente. They are going short, they are going hungry, for our sakes. They are practicing an intimate self-sacrifice in order that we may hold our own till their sons come to fight at our side. All over America the individual American citizen is making this self-sacrifice, and making it without a murmur. He is feeding, by his personal self-sacrifice, not only these islands, but France, Italy, and many of the neutrals.

This great demonstration of character has had no other impetus than the simple declaration of the facts by Herbert Hoover, the man who fed Belgium. Hoover has told his countrymen how things stand. That is all. The Winter of 1918, he declared to them, will prove to mankind whether or not the American Nation "is capable of individual self-sacrifice to save the world." His propaganda has never descended to unworthy levels. He has appealed always to the conscience of his countrymen. He has spoken of "a personal obligation upon every one of us toward some individual abroad who will suffer privation to the extent of our own individual negligence."

America has answered this appeal in a manner which marks her out as one of the greatest moral forces in the world. It should be known out there, in the farmhouses and cottages of the American Continent, that the people of this country are mindful of America's self-sacrifice, and are grateful.