Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 07.djvu/574

LEFT RELIEF, WAR 488 RELIGION winners to be assisted, but disabled sol- diers had to be tak'^r care of, and when the United States entered the war, much of the kind of relief chat went to Europe had to be dispensed also in this country. The Commission for Relief in Belgium was organized in October, 1914, and carried out its distribution of supplies through the Comite Nationale de Secours et d'Alimentation. The personnel was American until the declaration of war by the United States, but thereafter the work in Belgium was intrusted to Span- sh and Dutch citizens appointed by their governments. Through the work of this commission something like 7,000,000 peo- ple were regularly provided with food. Warehouses were established in Holland and Belgium, and these received Ameri- can and Argentine supplies from the port of entry at Rotterdam. Up to June 1, 1917, a total of nearly $300,000,000 was spent by the commission. As the war went on the number of relief organizations greatly increased, and some of them came to wear a doubt- ful character. There were, however, 80 such organizations working in New York City that were vouched for by the Charity Organization Society, and the chief among them made it their object to distribute necessities, such as food and clothing. Every known device was employed in the campaigns to raise foods, bazaars, concerts, street collecting, and the like. These became so numerous that division of responsibility and proper accounting became manifestly impossible, but the public continued to give, and though millions of dollars went into the wrong hands, the stream of supplies ?oing to Europe continued to grow. Among the other organizations that devoted their energies to the work of re- lief were the Allied War Charities, which through nearly 80 subsidiary organiza- tions, covered the whole nation; the American Fund for French "Wounded, the Secours National Fund for the relief of French women and children, the Serbian Relief Committee, the American ambulance, which organized ambulance sections for work behind the battle line; Jewish Relief, the British War Relief Association, the American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France, the Vacation War Relief Committee, the Polish Victims' Relief Fund, the Lafayette Fund, the American Girls' Aid for the Collection of Clothing for the Victims of the World War in France, the Duryea War Relief, the French Comfort Packets' Committee for the United States and Allies, the Stage Women's War Relief, the Committee of Mercy, Le Bien Etre du Blesse, the New York Committee for the Fatherless Children of France, the Dollar Christmas Fund for Destitute Belgian Children, the French Tubercu- losis War Victims' Fund, the American Committee of the Scottish Women's Hos- pital for Home and Foreign Service, the National Allied Relief Committee, the Balkan Refugees and Sufferers, Polish Refugees, War Babies' Cradle, the Polish Children's Relief Fund, the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Re- lief, the New York Surgical Dressings Committee, and many others. New or- ganizations continued to be formed while the war lasted, and none of them ap- peared to find difficulty in raising funds. See Red Cross, Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, Etc. RELIGION, a term that since the 16th century has become naturalized in most European languages. It has even in the Teutonic tongues taken the place of the native terms formerly in use. As to its etymology, the derivation from relin- quere is universally recognized to be in- consistent with phonetic laws; the necessity for assuming the existence of a lost transitive verb ligere, "to look," has not been made out; and the deriva- tion from relegere, which implies care- fulness and attention to what concerns the gods to be the primary signification of the word, is better than that from religare, which refers the origin of reli- gion to a sense of dependence on or con- nection with Deity by the bond of piety, inasmuch as the latter does not accord with the way in which the ancient Ro- mans used the terms religens and reli- giosus, and supposes in them a higher conception of religion than they are likely to have possessed. The Lacta- nian derivation (religare), however, has not been shown to violate any known linguistic law; and the reason which Professor Max Miiller gives ("Natural Religion," p. 35) as "the real objection" to it does not apply to it at all. It is not "the fact that in classical Latin religare is never used in the sense of binding or holding back." Binding or holding back, or behind, or fast, is its common meaning in classical Latin; it is its meaning in Csesar, Cicero, Sueto- nius, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. Its only other meaning is to unbind. General terms equivalent in meaning to religion are not to be found even in such languages as Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, or Arabic, and need not of course be looked for in the languages of uncultured peoples. There is no de- finition of religion in the Bible, nor any designation or description of it which applies to the heathen religions. The