The Glasgow courier. [volume] (Glasgow, Mont.) 1913-current, 1918-03-08

disease, Or dad. There Il, even a
more sad feature in the situation.
During the five years before the war
began twenty-three per cent Of all the
men who came up for enrolment for
military service in France, were re-
jected as unfit because Of tuberculosis.
Nine hundred thousand of these men
were rejected in the five years before
the war commenced. When the war
came and the iron heel of the invader
was upon French soil, these men were
called to the colors, and without any
exception they responded to the call.
Do you know what trench warfare
means to a man suffering from tuber-
culosis? 1t is murder. Many of these
men were captured by the Germans.
The food of a German prison camp
is not sufficient to sustain life in a
healthy man, let alone to support a
man suffering from tuberculosis and
needing the most nourishing food. In
the early days of the war the French
women put up packages of food to
send through neutral agencies to
their husbands or sons or sweethearts
who were in German prison camps.
In, the first year Of the war these
were good sized packages. As the war
went on, when the terrible grip of
hunger took hold upon the land, these
packages grew smaller and smaller.
The women of France never COM
planned; they never will complain;
they send what they are able to send,
that is all.
In France the shortage Of sugar is
SO great that no one is allowed to buy
more than one pound per month per
person, and they cannot always secure
even this amount. In our country the
average ordinary consumption of
sugar is between eighty-five and nine
ty pounds per year per person, while
in France the utmost that the people
are allowed to buy is twelve pounds
per year per person.
Do you know that in Italy not a
single private family, rich or poor,
will have a single pound of coal this
winter? To meet the "a emergency
in the manufacture of munitions, Italy
needs at present one and one-half
times per normal cost supply, but in
fact she is getting only t%wo-thirds of
her normal coal supply and she is
using it all for public enterprises, so
that private families cannot have a
single pound of coal this winter.
Over in Europe the people r hun
cry. If they lived acros the street
from you instead of across the ocean,
you would realize the situation very
much more than you do today and it
would not be necessary to make SO ur-
gent an appeal. Those people are
hungry. Nothing ever made me real
ize this so wildly as a story that was
told to me a year ago by a prominent
Hollander, who has been serving in
the Holland Red Cross. He told me
how he had watched a little girl in
a bread line on the other side Of the
sea. Can you think of your W
little girl standing in a bread line?
He said that he watched this little
girl for two and a half hours waiting
her turn, and when it came her turn
they put her on the scales, and
weighed her, and then they told her
that she had not lost weight enough
to be given any food that day! The
little girl cried bitterly and said she
had waited so long-but they did not
have the food to give.
Now this is a simple problem in
mathematics. There is only a certain
amount of wheat and meat and sugar
and coal in the world. If the needs Of
Europe are to be met they must be
met by the United States and Canada.
If you eat wheat and meat and sugar
as you are accustomed to eating them,
and if we waste coal as we have been
accustomed to wasting it, then the
allies will have to go without. We
can eat other things, corr and vege-
tables and fish and other kinds of
food. The people of Europe cannot
eat those other things. They must go
hungry unless we eat less meat, wheat
and sugar in order very greatly to in
crease u export of those foods
abroad. The magic formula which
will solve this problem and win the
war is as follows: 100,000,000 peo-
pie times 365 days in the year saving
one slice of bread each day, would
make a pile of bread bigger than the
capitol at Washington. One hundred
million people times 365 days in the
year saving one slice of meat apiece,
would make a pile of meat big enough
to feed an army. One hundred million
people times 365 days in the year,
eating one spoonful less of sugar or
one lump less of sugar per day, would