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organization which had so far no other assets than the private means of
its chairman and his friends.

The money, as finally arranged for, came from government subventions
about equally divided between England and France, in the form of loans
to the Belgian Government, put into the hands of the Commission. Later
when the United States came into the war, this country made all the
advances. Altogether nearly a billion dollars were spent by the C. R. B.
for supplies and their transportation, at an overhead expense of a
little more than one half of one per cent. This low overhead is a record
in the annals of large philanthropic undertaking, and is a measure of
the voluntary service of the organization and of its able management.

For the _secours_, fifty million dollars worth of gifts in money, food
and clothing were collected by the Commission from the charitable people
of America and Great Britain. The Belgians themselves inside the
country, the provinces, cities, and well-to-do individuals, added, under
the stimulus of the tragic situation and under the direction of the
great Belgian National Committee, hundreds of millions of francs to the
_secours_ funds. Also the Commission and the Belgian National Committee
arranged that a small profit should be charged on all the food sold to
the Belgians who could pay for it, and this profit, which ran into
millions of dollars, was turned into the funds for benevolence. All
this created an enormous sum for the _secours_, which was the real
"relief," as benevolence. And this enormous sum was needed, for by the
end of the war nearly one-half of all the imprisoned population of over
seven million Belgians and two and a half million French were receiving
their daily bread wholly or partly on charity. Actually one half of the
inhabitants of the great city of Antwerp were at one time in the daily
soup and bread lines.

Of the money and goods for benevolence that came from outside sources
more than one third came from England and the British Dominions--New
Zealand gave more money per capita for Belgian relief than any other
country--while the rest came chiefly from the United States, a small
fraction coming from other countries. The relief collections in Great
Britain were made by a single great benevolent organization called the
"National Committee for Relief in Belgium." This Committee, under the
chairmanship of the Lord Mayor of London and the active management of
Sir William Go