lot seaport town Antwerp,
which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by
them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets,
where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle
from dark doorways.

Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who
were organizing a different kind of campaign from that which brought
glory to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr.
Rose--that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm
among the mountaineers of the Southern States--should be
succouring Belgium, and yet only natural. Where else should he and
Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of
the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an
endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?

They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern
Departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating
conditions. For they were practical men, trained for solving the
problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money
was well spent. They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they
found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were
worthy of help. The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a
month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was
the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the
destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later they were to go to
Poland; then to Serbia.

With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the
head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded
over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could
not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They
must have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work
was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that
could be done only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of
his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes
scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.

When "Harvard, 1914," who had lent a hand in the American
refugees' trials, appeared in Hoover's office to volunteer for the new
campaign, Hoover said: "You are going to Rotterdam to-night." "So I
am!" said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not red
tape must prevail in such an organization.

The Belgians whom I wished to see were those be