Atlanta Daily World

Civilization Has Obligation

A NATIONAL Committee on Food for the Five Small Democracies, with Herbert Hoover as its honorary chairman, has been organized to "raise a voice in behalf" of the people of Finland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Central Poland.

How to make food available to these people without it being seized by the Nazis, is being considered. The Hoover organization and the British government both know that Germany has systematically looted her conquered territories of food and supplies. Both know that the blockade is England's most deadly weapon, and that weakening of the blockade would weaken Great Britain's ultimate power to destroy the Nazi tyranny.

But how to relieve suffering still remains a problem for civilized peoples. Commenting on sending food to them, the New York Times says editorially that Mr. Hoover "can point to the safeguards with which he has surrounded his proposals--safeguards resting not on German good faith, but on German performance."

The distribution of food would be strictly in the hands of a neutral agency as it was in Belgium during the whole of the World War. No more than two weeks' supply of imported food would be permitted inside any occupied country at any time. If any of this food should be diverted to German uses, or if Germany should resume looting of the occupied lands, the shipments from America would stop; and Germany would be branded finally and conclusively, in the minds of the conquered peoples themselves, as the sole cause of the misery that would ensue.

"It may be important," says the Times, "in the winning of the war and in the rebuilding of democracy, that responsibility should thus be pinned unmistakably onto Germany."

Can human sympathy and realities of the British blockade be correlated so as to benefit starving, helpless people?

It would seem that human intelligence could find a way.