Defenders of Democracy; Contributions from Representative Men and Women of Letters and Other Arts from Our Allies and Our Own Country (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BELGIUM AND AMERICA IT would be a banality to speak about the gratitude of the Belgian people toward America. Every one knows from the beginning of the war that when the Belgians were faced with starvation, it was the American Commission for Relief which saved the situation, forming all over the country, in America and elsewhere, those Committees who collected the funds raised to help the Belgians, and saw that they reached the proper channel and were utilized to the best advantage of the Belgian people. But helping to feed the people was not enough. The Americans did more. They gave their heart. Every .one of them who came into my country to act as a volunteer for the Commission for Relief, brought with him the sympathy of all the people that were behind him. Every one of these young Americans, who, under the leadership of Mr. Hoover, came into my country to watch the distribution of the foodstuffs imported by the Commission for Relief, became a sincere friend of my countrymen. He stood between us and the Germans as a vigilant sentry of the civilized world, and was able to tell when he returned to America all the sufferings and all the courage of the Belgian population. I remember traveling in America some ten years ago, and being asked, while I was reading a Belgian paper, where this paper came from and when I answered "It came from Belgium," the next question was: "Belgium? It is a province of France, isn't it?" Now I do not think that any person in America, nor in any other part of the world, will not know where Belgium is. The American Commission for Relief has to be credited with putting in closer contact the suffering population of my country with all persons the world over who were eager to assist it. It es- pecially brought the sufferings of our people near...