But even with the food thus brought in there were many persons, and as the days and months and years passed they increased to very many, who had no money to buy this food. They were the destitute, the families of the hundreds of thousands of men thrown out of work by the destruction of the factories and the cessation of all manufacturing and commerce. And there were the Government employees, the artists, the lace-making women and girls, and a whole series of special kinds of wage-earners, with all wages suddenly stopped. To all these the food had to be given without pay. This was the _secours_. To obtain the food from America and Argentina and India and wherever else it could be found a constant supply of money in huge amounts was necessary. Hoover realized from the beginning that no income from charity alone could provide it. His first great problem was to assure the Commission of means for the general _ravitaillement_. He solved the problem but it took time. In the meanwhile the pressure for immediate relief was strong. He began to buy on the credit of a philanthropic organization which had so far no other assets than the private means of its chairman and his friends. The money, as finally arranged for, came from government subventions about equally divided between England and France, in the form of loans to the Belgian Government, put into the hands of the Commission. Later when the United States came into the war, this country made all the advances. Altogether nearly a billion dollars were spent by the C. R. B. for supplies and their transportation, at an overhead expense of a little more than one half of one per cent. This low overhead is a record in the annals of large philanthropic undertaking, and is a measure of the voluntary service of the organization and of its able management. For the _secours_, fifty million dollars worth of gifts in money, food and clothing were collected by the Commission from the charitable people of America and Great Britain. The Belgians themselves inside the country, the provinces, cities, and well-to-do individuals, added, under the stimulus of the tragic situation and under the direction of the great Belgian National Committee, hundreds of millions of francs to the _secours_ funds. Also the Commission and the Belgian National Committee arranged that a small profit should be charged on all the food sold to the Belgians who could pay for it, and this profit, which ran into millions of dollars, was turned into the funds for benevolence. All this created an enormous sum for the _secours_, which was the real "relief," as benevolence. And this enormous sum was needed, for by the end of the war nearly one-half of all the imprisoned population of over seven million Belgians and two and a half million French were receiving their daily bread wholly or partly on charity. Actually one half of the inhabitants of the great city of Antwerp were at one time in the daily soup and bread lines.