The paralysis of industry and commerce, resulting in unemployment—that is, in suppression of wages.
In short, a diminution of resources, accompanied by an increase of expenditure; so that the public coffers are almost powerless to come to the aid of private distress.
That is how we stand in Belgium.
It is not our intention to depict the poignant distress which has overwhelmed our country. We shall merely explain briefly how we try to cope with it; this will suffice to give some idea of it.
Creation of Temporary Shelters.
Let us first of all consider the country districts. Even when a few houses only of a village have escaped incendiarism the inhabitants have returned thither and have resumed their customary labours. Must they not plough and sow, under penalty of preparing for themselves another year of wretchedness? Where houses exist no longer they live in a cellar, or an outhouse to which some kind of roof has been improvised; families passed the winter of 1914-15 in a potato-silo,[31] under the shelter of a few mats of straw. In the ruined villages the first anxiety of the public powers and the relief committees was therefore to provide provisional shelter.
In the towns and industrial districts the most urgent necessities are of another kind. What is lacking most particularly is employment. The administrations have therefore set themselves to provide the unemployed with paid occupations which do not demand apprenticeship—the clearing of ruins, the levelling of soil, the digging of reservoirs, etc. The communal coffers being empty, communal vouchers are issued. L'Événement Illustré, in its fourth issue, gives reproductions of some of these vouchers, of which, it states, there are more than 500. In the communes near Louvain, where the poverty is particularly poignant, it has been necessary to create vouchers for 2 centimes (at Wilsele) and 5 centimes (at Herent).
From the outset stringent measures were taken to make up for the insufficiency of provisions and to prevent speculators from obtaining possession of existing stocks. The most important of these regulations are the following:—