Help was tendered lavishly from the Dominions and Crown Colonies; at home private houses and other buildings were freely offered for hospital purposes, yachts were converted by their owners into hospital ships, and the great London hospitals allotted beds for the wounded. Great activity--sometimes marked by zeal rather than knowledge--was shown in preparing for Red Cross work, and in making clothes for soldiers and others. The Queen issued an appeal to all needlework guilds throughout the British Isles (Aug. 10) to send in underclothing for soldiers and sailors, and ordinary garments for their wives and children and such of the civil population as might suffer through unemployment; steps were taken locally to consider how distress might be mitigated, and the newspapers were full of suggestions for help. But, after the first shock, the great mass of British citizens kept their heads, responded as far as possible to the call for "business as usual," and prepared to face bravely the prospect of lessened income--already visible in the withholding of many interim dividends--and the huge sacrifices demanded by the contest. In two respects only there had been at the outset a tendency to panic. Before the Bank Holiday there had been some attempt by private persons to lay in large stores of food, and to draw gold from the banks; when the shops reopened on August 4, there was a rush to buy provisions in many great provincial cities; next day the alarm spread to London; the great stores were besieged; one of them had to close its provision department, another refused to supply customers with more than ordinary quantities; many of the small shops were speedily sold out; in the East End certain wholesale dealers, to encourage a rise in prices, actually provided purchasers with money; and, in the West End and some southern residential towns on that day and for some days afterwards, well-to-do people personally loaded hundredweights of stores into their own motor-cars, and packed their houses to the roof. But there was no real lack of foodstuffs; steps were taken at once by the Government to keep open the foreign sources of supply by a scheme of insurance against war risks; it took over the flour mills; and a Consultative Committee on Food Supplies met the representatives of certain great distributive companies and of the Grocers' Federation, representing some 17,000 shops, and lists of maximum retail prices were issued, as given below. The interruption was mainly in the supply of sugar from the Continent, and in that of butter, bacon, and eggs from Denmark. The following list (given in _The Times_, Aug. 7) shows the first effect of the war on wholesale prices. July 28. August 6. _s._ _d._ _s._ _d._