The farmer at the end of the table told us with pride how the Soviet government lends money to farms, and lends money at very low interest to people who want to build houses on their farms. He told how farm information is available under the Soviet government.

We said that the same thing is true in America, and this they had never heard of. They had never heard of the farm loans or of the important work that is done by our Department of Agriculture. It was all news to them. As a matter of fact, they seemed to think that they had invented the system themselves.

Across the road a man and woman were working in the rain, raising the timbers for their roof-tree to the top of newly built walls. And on the road the children were driving the cows in from pasturage to the barns.

The women in their clean headcloths leaned through the kitchen door and listened to the conversation. And the conversation turned to foreign policies. The questions were sharp.

One farmer asked, “What would the American government do if the Soviet government loaned money and military aid to Mexico, with the avowed purpose of preventing the spread of democracy?”

And we thought for a while and we said, “Well, we imagine we would declare war.”

And he said, “But you have loaned money to Turkey, which is on our border, with the purpose of preventing the spread of our system. And we have not declared war.”

And our host said, “It seems to us that the American people are democratic people. Can you explain to us why the American government has as its friends reactionary governments, the governments of Franco and Trujillo, the military dictatorship of Turkey, and the corrupt monarchy of Greece?”

We could not answer their questions because we didn’t know enough, and because we are not in the confidence of our makers of foreign policy. We told them instead what was being asked in America: the questions about the domination of the Balkans by Communist parties; the questions about, and the denunciations of, the use of the veto by the Russians in the United Nations; the questions about the denunciation of America by the Russian press.

These things seemed to balance each other—they knew no more about their foreign policy than we knew about ours. There was no animosity in their questions, only wonder. Finally our host stood up, and he raised his glass, and he said, “Somewhere in all of this there must be an answer, and there must be an answer quickly. Let us drink to the hope that the answer may be found, for the world needs peace, needs peace very badly.” And he pointed to the two who were struggling with the heavy beams to build a roof, and he said, “This winter those two will have a house for the first time since 1941. They must have peace, they want their house. They have three small children who have never had a house to live in. There cannot be in the world anyone so wicked as to want to put them back in holes under the ground. But that is where they have been living.”