continued to give their services till the end of the war. Lord Glad- stone was chairman of the managing committee and Mr. Algernon Maudsley, who had assisted the committee from the earliest days of the war, hon. secretary. The health department, which made pro- vision for chronic, maternity, convalescent and dental cases all over the country, was organized by the Countess of Sandwich in Oct. 1914 and afterwards by Dame Victoria Samuel. Viscountess Gladstone was at first in charge of the education department, and Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton of hostels and flats for the use of refugees passing through London. Mrs. Henn Collins and Mrs. A. S. Webbe looked after undesirables and organized rescue work.
In the first months of the war, owing to unemployment at home and to the feeling that the Belgians might soon be able to return to their own country, the refugees were discouraged from seeking paid work. But when this policy was reversed, it became the chief duty of the relief committees to help their guests to find employment. During 1915 factories for the manufacture of war material, estab- lished by the initiative of the Belgians themselves, were staffed with Belgian labour, and 65,000 refugees obtained work through the labour exchanges. Ultimately, nearly all the refugees, except those of the professional classes, were absorbed into the economic life of the country. This did not mean that they were all entirely self- supporting, owing to the high rent of furnished rooms and to the difficulties besetting exiles in a foreign country. Lady Lugard's hos- pitality committee and the Duchess of Somerset's housing committee established hostels for the propertied and professional classes, where the Government allowance was supplemented by a private fund. A scheme for assistance with the rent of furnished flats in London on a large scale, devised by Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, proved an immense boon to all classes of refugees.
In the first week of Oct. 1914, the Wounded Allies Relief Com- mittee organized the transportation of the first wounded soldiers from Belgian hospitals to England. Auxiliary V.A.D. hospitals, mobilized, but not at the time needed for the British, opened with enthusiasm to receive the Belgians. 40,000 wounded soldiers came to England, many to return shortly to the front. The first of the five King Albert military hospitals, established in England by the Belgian Government, opened at Highgate in Dec. 1914. By degrees the seriously wounded were concentrated in this hospital, which remained open till 1919, and the discharged drafted to a Belgian reeducation camp in France.
Owing to the large number of refugees in England, the Belgian soldier at the front had to be helped to spend his leave with his relatives. The Local Government Board, from Jan. 1916 onwards, bore the expenses of his journey; a special channel service transport- ing 300 men a day was organized ; the transport department of the War Refugees Committee under Mr. H. Campbell arranged the distribution of 185,000 men to their families, and the British Club for Belgian Soldiers was opened from voluntary sources as a residential club for men without friends or relatives.
Gradually much help was organized for their compatriots by the refugees themselves. A " Union de Comites " under M. Emile Vandervelde, Ministre de 1'Intendance de 1'Armee Beige, which had its headquarters in London, coordinated the work of approxi- mately 20 Belgian funds chiefly for Belgian soldiers. Mme. Edmond Carton de Wiart, Mme. Maton, wife of the Belgian military attache^ in London, and Mme. Pollet, wife of the consul-general for Belgium, took a prominent part in the charitable activities of the Belgian community.
During four and a half years of exile the Belgians grew to feel at home in a strange land, and when the time for repatriation came, many were loth to go. The expenses of repatriation were borne by the British Government at a cost of 243,000 and in Oct. 1920 a monument was erected on the Thames Embankment from a fund raised by the ex-refugees themselves, in memory of their exile in Great Britain during the war. (A. E. C.)
UNITED STATES
When the United States entered the World War in April 1917, but one organization depending mainly on the efforts of women was officially recognized by the Government: the Red Cross. On May 6 1917 the Red Cross had 562 chapters with a membership of 486,194. At the signing of the Armistice, it had more than 3,500 chapters and upwards of 8,000,000 regular volunteer women workers. These women produced in 20 months over 371,000,- ooo relief articles, including surgical dressings, garments for the wounded and the refugees, and a variety of comforts and con- veniences for soldiers and sailors. The value of their output was about $94,000,000. The Red Cross enrolled during the war 23,822 women as nurses. They served in the military and naval hospitals in the United States, Europe, and the Near East, as well as in convalescent homes for soldiers and sailors and in relief work for adults and children both in the United States and overseas. They worked in 700 Red Cross canteens in the United States and 130 in France, serving refreshments to moving troops,
giving them medical care, transferring them when sick, and in other ways aiding and cheering them.
When war was declared many targe national organizations of women applied to the Government for instructions. The Coun- cil of National Defense appointed at the end of April 1917 a com- mittee of nine women (afterwards increased to eleven) with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw as chairman, to form a plan by which the women of the country could be utilized. This committee selected a woman in each state as a temporary chairman, requesting her to call together the heads of all national organizations of women in her territory to elect permanent officers for a state division. This state division was in turn to organize county committees and each county was to form a division in each city and town. This work of organization was carried on so rapidly that by Dec. 1917 the county organization was complete in 23 states, and a year later there were county chairmen in more than 80% of all the counties in the country. Seventy-three different national organi- zations of women cooperated. Through these divisions it was possible to convey at once to practically all of the women of the nation the requests of the Government.
The plan of work which the women's committee laid out in- cluded the following departments: (i) registration for service, (2) food production and home economics, (3) food administration, (4) women in industry, (5) child welfare, (6) maintenance of exist- ing social service agencies, (7) health and recreation, (8) educa- tional propaganda, (9) Liberty Loan work, (10) home and foreign relief. The specific tasks for these departments originated either in requests or suggestions of the Government or in plans made by the committee itself and approved by the Government. Two months after the women's committee was created it was requested by the Government to enrol the women of the country in a league to support such plans for food conservation as the food administration might present. In a few weeks 5,223,850 pledge cards were signed. The signers were the nucleus of a women's food army which, throughout the war, responded to every re- quest for the conservation, substitution or production of foods made by the food administration. Throughout the war, the women's committee continued to serve the Government in simi- lar drives. For some months the committee gave active assistance to the national women's Liberty Loan Committee created by the Secretary of the Treasury, and in 1918, at the request of the agencies responsible for furnishing nurses to the army, including the Red Cross, and the surgeon-general's office undertook a campaign to enrol students for the U.S. student nurses' reserve. While 5,000 student nurses had been asked for, 13,880 were enrolled, and by the end of Dec. of that year 7,730 of these had been placed for training.
The National League for Women's Service, an organization formed after a study of the activities of Englishwomen, some weeks before the United States went into the war, developed an exten- sive motor corps, carried on a variety of services to soldiers and sailors, and effectively supported all drives. The Y.W.C.A. organized in June 1917 a war council, under which it developed a variety of service clubs, both in the United States and overseas, particularly France. The hostess houses of the association at the home camps of both white and coloured soldiers looked after women visitors, a service which proved of such value that the War Department at the close of the war took the work under its educational and recreational branch. Some 50 buildings were turned over to the Government by the war works council of the Y.W.C.A. Overseas the association conducted service clubs which served Red Cross nurses and other women workers. Both in France and in the United States this organization carried on industrial service clubs near large manufacturing centres.
The employment of women in war industries began in the United States in the winter of 1914-5 with the manufacture of supplies for the Allies. The percentage of women to men in the 19 leading war industries increased from 6-5 % in 1914 to 7-7 % in the latter part of 1916. In the next two years, to the close of 1918, the proportion rose in these industries to 13-9 per cent. A conservative estimate places the number of women employed in factories (food, textile and war supplies) by the end of 1918 at 2,139,100 an increase of be- tween five and six hundred thousand over the number employed in
