The President went to some pains to explain to the country what the export embargo meant. He created a Board of Exports Control, or Exports Council, composed of Herbert C. Hoover, the selected head of the food administration body, and a number of leading Government officials. This board's duty was to prevent a single bushel of wheat or the smallest quantity of any other commodity from leaving an American port without the board's license and approval. This check on exports, the President pointed out, regulated and supervised their disposition, and was not really an embargo, except on consignments to Germany. "There will, of course, be no prohibition of exports," he said. "The normal course of trade will be interfered with as little as possible, and, so far as possible, only its abnormal course directed. The whole object will be to direct exports in such a way that they will go first and by preference where they are most needed and most immediately needed, and temporarily to withhold them, if necessary, where they can best be spared. "Our primary duty in the matter of foodstuffs and like necessaries is to see to it that the peoples associated with us in the war get as generous a proportion as possible of our surplus, but it will also be our wish and purpose to supply the neutral nations whose peoples depend upon us for such supplies as nearly in proportion to their need as the amount to be divided permits." Nevertheless the proclamation that came from the White House on July 9, 1917, disclosed an exercise of presidential authority without precedent in American history in that it contemplated, with British cooperation, the virtual domination of the country's trade with the whole world. It provided for the absolute governmental control, by license, of the exports of essential war commodities to fifty-six nations and their possessions, including all the Allied belligerents, all the neutrals, as well as the enemy countries. These commodities embraced coal, coke, fuel, oils, kerosene and gasoline, including bunkers, food grains, flour and meal, fodder and feeds, meats and fats, pig iron, steel billets, ship plates and structural shapes, scrap iron and scrap steel, ferromanganese, fertilizers, arms, ammunition and explosives. By the control of coal and other fuels the Government was bent on obtaining a firm grasp on shipping. And the point was, as stated in the preamble of the proclamation, "the public safety requires that succor shall be prevented from reaching the enemy." Europe hailed the establishment of the American embargo as signalizing a "real blockade" against Germany. The Paris "Temps" succinctly expressed the prevailing view in the Allied countries: