those who have
suffered is to have won the heart of France. The caring for the French
repatriates and refugees is a definite contribution to the winning of
the war.

The French system of handling this human stream of tragedy is to
send the sick to local hospitals and the exhausted to the _maison
de repos_. The comparatively healthy are allowed to be claimed by
friends; the utterly homeless are sent to some prefecture remote from
the front-line. The prefects in turn distribute them among towns and
villages, lodging them in old barracks, casinos and any buildings
which war-conditions have made vacant. The adults are allowed by the
Government a franc and a half per day, and the children seventy-five
centimes.

The armies have drained France of her doctors since the war; until
the Americans came, the available medical attention was wholly
inadequate to the civilian population. The American Red Cross is now
establishing dispensaries through the length and breadth of France.
In country districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurating
automobile-dispensaries which make their rounds on fixed and
advertised days. In addition to this it has started a child-welfare
movement, the aim of which is to build up the birth-rate and lower the
infant mortality by spreading the right kind of knowledge among the
women and girls.

The condition of the refugees and repatriates, thrust into communities
to which they came as paupers and crowded into buildings which were
never planned for domestic purposes, has been far from enviable. In
September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed over the solving of
this problem to one of its experts who had organised the aid given to
San Francisco after the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the
relief-work necessitated by the Ohio floods at Dayton. Co-operating
with the French, houses partially constructed at the outbreak of war
were now completed and furnished, and approximately three thousand
families were supplied with homes and privacy. The start made
proved satisfactory. Supplies, running into millions of francs, were
requisitioned, and the plan for getting the people out of public
buildings into homes was introduced to the officials of most of the
departments of France. Delegates were sent out by the Red Cross to
undertake the organisation of the work. Money was apportioned for the
supplying of destitute families with furniture and the instruments
of trade; the object in view was not