hard four years. We must make a fresh
start.

First, then, as to money. And to understand about the money it is
necessary to understand the two-phased character of the relief of
Belgium. There was the phase of _ravitaillement_, the constant
provisioning of the whole land; and the phase of _secours_, the special
care of the destitute and the ill and the children.

The ring of steel did not immediately make beggars of all the Belgians
enclosed within it. Many of them still had money. But, as I have already
said, the Germans would not allow any of this money to go out. It could
buy only what was in Belgium. And as Belgium could produce only about
half the food it needed to keep its people alive, and only one fourth of
the particular kind of foodstuffs that were necessary for bread, and as
it was arranged, by control of the mills and bakeries, that these
bread-grains should be evenly distributed among all the people, it meant
that even though banker this or baron that might have money to buy much
more, he could really buy, with all his money, only one fourth as much
bread as he needed. There had to be, in other words, a constant bringing
in of enough wheat and flour to supply three fourths of the bread-needs
of the whole country, and another large fraction of the necessary fats
and milk and rice and beans and other staples. This was the
_ravitaillement_.

But even with the food thus brought in there were many persons, and as
the days and months and years passed they increased to very many, who
had no money to buy this food. They were the destitute, the families of
the hundreds of thousands of men thrown out of work by the destruction
of the factories and the cessation of all manufacturing and commerce.
And there were the Government employees, the artists, the lace-making
women and girls, and a whole series of special kinds of wage-earners,
with all wages suddenly stopped. To all these the food had to be given
without pay. This was the _secours_.

To obtain the food from America and Argentina and India and wherever
else it could be found a constant supply of money in huge amounts was
necessary. Hoover realized from the beginning that no income from
charity alone could provide it. His first great problem was to assure
the Commission of means for the general _ravitaillement_. He solved the
problem but it took time. In the meanwhile the pressure for immediate
relief was strong. He began to buy on the credit of a philanthro