Editorial April 21, 1917 Issue

Bread of Life

William D. McCrackan

The battle cry for bread is heard among the nations. It is sweeping aside class and caste, special privilege and unearned profit, freeing prisoners, and forcing the surrender of organized evil. Overnight as it seemed, in three short days as history records, the largest continental nation in the world won its freedom with the battle cry for bread. Autocracy pinched by war produced an artificial shortage of food. Democracy demanded to be fed; autocracy, thinking to suppress freedom, attacked, and instead forged a new nation, the latest arrival among the republics, founded upon a loaf of bread. The calculated cruelties, mock heroics, and costly spy systems of pretended supermen spell want and famine for the rank and file, and to avert universal desolation the democracies of the earth are now uniting to maintain that of which the loaf of bread is today the symbol.

In this cooperation the peoples are finding each other, and thereby the brotherhood of man. Every loaf is the result of a network of common endeavor crossing continents and spanning the seas, linking one to the other the men and their womenkind, the plowman, the sower of the seed, the harvester, the miller and the baker, the housewife and the kitchen maid, the makers of machinery, the builders of barns, railroads, elevators, and ships, the farmer's wife, the stenographer, and the woman legislator.

Humanity's cry for bread is the outward expression of an inner want, of a spiritual desire. The temporal need may be met by material bread, but the spiritual craving will not be satisfied with anything less than that "bread of heaven" of which if a man eat he shall never hunger again.

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