Europe, when the President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was that great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe and affection. Labor leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble schemes.[56] To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said, "If President Wilson were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon them, they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur and set to work at once." In German-Austria his fame was that of a savior, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted. A touching instance of this which occurred in the Austrian capital, when narrated to the President, moved him to tears. There were some five or six thousand Austrian children in the hospitals at Vienna who, as Christmas was drawing near, were sorely in need of medicaments and much else. The head of the American Red Cross took up their case and persuaded the Americans in France to send two million dollars' worth of medicaments to Vienna. These were duly despatched, and had got as far as Berne, when the French authorities, having got wind of the matter, protested against this premature assistance to infant enemies on grounds which the other Allies had to recognize as technically tenable, and the medicaments were ordered back to France from Berne. Thereupon Doctor Ferries, of the International Red Cross, became wild with indignation and laid the matter before the Swiss government, which undertook to send some medicaments to the children, while the Americans were endeavoring to move the French to allow at least some of the remedies to go through. The children in the hospitals, when told that they must wait, were bright and hopeful. "It will be all right," some of them exclaimed. "Wilson is coming soon, and he will bring us everything."