As I write these lines the descent on our shores of an army of refugees from captured Antwerp and threatened Ostend has forced the President of the Local Government Board to make a desperate appeal to all and sundry to form representative committees to deal with the prevention and relief of distress:  in other words to save the refugees from starving to death.  Now the Board of Trade has already drawn attention to a memorandum of the Local Government Board as to the propriety of providing employment for refugees.  And instantly and inevitably the condition had to be laid down that if the Committees find employment for anyone, they shall refer the case to the local Labour Exchange in order that “any steps taken to assist refugees to find employment shall not be such as to endanger the employment of British workpeople.”  In other words, the starving Belgians have fled from the Germans only to compete for crust with starving Englishmen.  As long as there is an unemployed Englishman in the country—­and there are a good many, especially in the cotton industry—­how is it possible to give a job to a Belgian without depriving an Englishman of it?  Why, instead of making impossible conditions, and helplessly asking 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.