DEPARTMENT OF STATE.

DEPORTATION OF CIVILIANS FROM BELGIUM. 363
appears necessary in order to prevent a one-sided judgment
of the question.
Those who, far away from the scenes of the war, are able
to judge the conditions in the territories occupied in the
west only in a superficial manner will perhaps not understand
so easily that the measures taken are not only by no
means injurious to the population of these regions from an
economic standpoint, but had become to a certain extent
a social necessity owing to the peculiar conditions prevailing
there. He who wishes to comprehend this must first
picture to himself the extent and effects of the nonemployment
in Belgium. The chief cause of this is the British
naval blockade, which is being ruthlessly enforced even
against Belgium. Belgian industry is so greatly dependent
on the importation of raw materials and the exportation
of manufactured articles that the almost complete
stoppage of foreign trade by England necessarily entailed
automatically the paralyzation of by far the greater part
of Belgian industries. This is especially the case with
the important iron and steel industries, textile and clothing
industries, and the keramic and glass industry, which
together employed over half a million workmen in time of
peace, as well as with the leather, tobacco, paper, and
chemical industry. Even fishing has entirely ceased in
consequence of the blockade of the North Sea coast. A
number of other enterprises had to be suspended because
the materials used and their transportation had become so
dear that the work was conducted at a loss; this occurred,
among others, with the building industry (employing in
peace 95,000 laborers) and the wood and furniture industry
(80,000 laborers). The important mining industry
owes it only to the extensive exportation of coal to Germany
that it is able to employ about nine-tenths of its
145,000 laborers, and the stone quarries also employ onethird
of their force, which had hitherto consisted of 35,000
hands, in order to fulfill orders which are mostly German.
That, as frequently asserted in Belgium, requisitions of
raw materials and machinery by Germany have considerably
increased the unemployment is not true for the reason
that these requisitions were made primarily in factories
which were unable any way to keep running owing to one
of the aforementioned causes.
The result of these occurrences is that, out of 1,200,000
men and women who worked in Belgian industrial enterprises
before the war, and who represent about half of all
persons in Belgium engaged in earning a living, 505,000
(including 158,000 women) are entirely and 150,000 (including
46,000 women) partially unemployed. Altogether
there are therefore 655,000 persons, formerly earning
their living by labor in industry, who are now
dependent upon public assistance, a number which,
added to 293,000 wives and 612,000 children of the unemployed,
reaches a total of 1,560,000 needy people and
represents about one-fifth of the entire population of
Belgium.
In so highly a developed industrial nation as Belgium
i&is state of affairs, without precedent in history, had