Certain communes also sell meat; others have installed communal stores for the sale of all kinds of provisions, especially preserved foods, dried vegetables, salt, potatoes, etc.; almost everywhere coal is sold retail; petroleum was sold as long as it could be obtained. Moreover, the collectivities are distributing enormous quantities of clothes; in the Brussels district alone by the end of January 660,865 frs. worth of clothing and footwear had been given to the necessitous. Abuses have as far as possible been guarded against, (1) by the "household card," the _Carte de ménage_, which indicates the number of persons composing each family; and (2) by the limitation of the quantity of each kind of goods which the household can obtain during the week. The basis of alimentation is bread. Therefore particularly Draconian rules have been elaborated for the bakeries. _The National Relief Committee._ Many problems presented themselves simultaneously, and with an extreme urgency. In all communes local committees have been set up, entrusted with the equitable distribution of provisions among all the inhabitants. We say "all the inhabitants," for the reader must not form any illusions as to our condition: there is not a single Belgian family which, if left to itself, could obtain its daily bread; the general rationing to which the whole population is subjected makes rich and poor equally dependent on the National Committee of Relief and Alimentation. To organize the feeding of the public would have been a task above our strength if Belgium, in her present distress, had been abandoned to her own resources. But the misfortunes which have come upon us because we could not consent to comply with the orders of a tyrannical and perjured neighbour--the poverty which cripples us more completely day by day, as requisitions, pillage, taxes, and fines deprive us of our last resources--the massacres and the incendiarism which have turned into deserts the most fertile and most densely peopled provinces of Europe--the molestations and annoyances which have reduced to unemployment a working population whose activity is proverbial--in short, the unmerited misfortune which _Kultur_ has inflicted upon us--all this has awakened, in all the civilized nations, a current of sympathy and solidarity with poor Belgium.