LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| A “Little Bees” Dining-room for Sub-normal Children | [Frontispiece] |
| FACING PAGE | |
| Ready for the Children | [36] |
| A “Little Bees” cantine for sub-normal children. | |
| A Meal for Young Mothers | [112] |
| One Corner of the Brussels Hippodrome, Now a Central Clothing Supply Station | [144] |
| The Antwerp Music-hall, Now a Sewing-room | [152] |
| Here hundreds of women are being saved by being furnished the opportunity to work two weeks in each month, on an average wage of sixty cents a week. | |
| The Supplementary Meal the Relief Committee Is Now Trying to Give to 1,250,000 School Children | [160] |
| Toys Created By Women of Belgium | [176] |
| 1,662 Children, Made Sub-normal by the War, Waiting for Their Dinner | [204] |
[INTRODUCTION]
By Herbert Hoover
Belgium, after centuries of intermittent misery and recuperation as the cockpit of Europe, had with a hundred years of the peaceful fruition of the intelligence, courage, thrift, and industry of its people, emerged as the beehive of the Continent. Its population of 8,000,000 upon an area of little less than Maryland was supported by the importation of raw materials, and by their manufacture and their exchange over-seas for two-thirds of the vital necessities of its daily life.
When in the summer of 1914 the people were again drawn into the European maelstrom, 600,000 of them became fugitives abroad, and the remainder were reduced to the state of a city which, captured by a hostile army, is in turn besieged from without. Thus, its boundaries were a wall of bayonets and a blockading fleet.
Under modern economic conditions, no importing nation carries more than a few weeks’ reserve stock of food, depending as it does upon the daily arrivals of commerce; and the cessation of this inflow, together with the destruction and requisition of their meager stocks, threatened the Belgians with an even greater catastrophe—the loss of their very life.