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 have died, and the death-rate is now much higher than the birth-rate."

That is a bare summary of what has occurred; but the agony of Lodz is revealed in detail in the narrative of a visitor to the city, which was published in the "Nowa Reforma" not long ago:—

"Wishing to acquaint myself with the misery in the factory towns and to consider means of relief, I went to Lodz. What I found surpassed my most awful fears. The population is slowly dying, after exhausting its forces in a hopeless struggle. I went under the guidance of the relief caretaker of the district and I visited only one street, Ciemna, in the suburb of Bluty. We went to the house of a boy who is now in our Home for Children at Kutno. We were to take his love to his parents. 'Our parents are gone,' answered his eldest sister of about 15. ' Father died a week ago of exhaustion, and the day after father's funeral mother died of typhus. It is the same next door. Both the father and the mother have died during the war, leaving four small children in the care of a brother of 18.'

"When we entered this other tenement we found the youngest child of two dead and the girl of four dying. There were others who had no strength left to fetch wood from the forests round the town, and were burning everything they had—tables, beds, and even picture-frames.

"In one of these tenements we found only a group of crying children. The mother had died and the father had gone out into the country to beg for potatoes. They had sold everything.