ng private citizens to do something for
pity's sake, will not the Government face the fact that the refugee
question is simply an intensification of the normal unemployed question,
the only difference being that we are accustomed to leave our own people
to starve when they are common persons with whom the governing classes
do not associate, whereas the Belgians have rendered us such a
tremendous service in the war, and our statesmen have so loudly
protested that the integrity of Belgium is dearer to England than her
own heart's blood, that we cannot with any decency treat the destitute
Belgians as if they were mere British riffraff. Yet when we attempt to
provide for the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has
to point out that by doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths
of our own people. Hence we arrive at the remarkable situation of
starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through barbed wire
fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners
of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I
rush through Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I
hereby acknowledge publicly with all possible good feeling). I therefore
for the present strongly recommend all Belgians who have made up their
minds to flee to England, to pick up German uniforms on the battle
fields and surrender to the British in the character of Uhlans. Their
subsistence will then be secure until the war is over, as we dare not
illtreat our prisoners lest the Germans should retaliate upon the
British soldiers in their hands, even if we were all spiteful enough to
desire to do it, as some of our baser sort have not been ashamed to
propose.

But the women and children, and the too young and the too old, cannot
resort to this expedient. And though theoretically our own unemployed
could be dressed in British uniforms and sent abroad with instructions
to take refuge in neutral territory and be "interned" or to surrender to
the first Uhlan patrol they met, yet it would be difficult to reduce
this theory to practice, though the possibility is worth mentioning as a
reduction to absurdity of the situation. As a matter of common sense "we
should at once place all destitute Belgian refugees on the footing of
prisoners of war, except that we need not post sentries to shoot them if
they try to escape, nor surround them with barbed wire. Indeed these
precautions are necessary in