As yet M. Briavionne remarks in his work, “_De l’Industrie en Belgique_,” the receipts of the railroads are below the calculations of these projectors; but this is hoped to be remedied in time by a diminished expenditure in management and repairs; and, perhaps, by an increase in the tarif of fares, which are felt to be lower than is equitable to the interests of the undertaking. Sixty-eight out of every one hundred passengers availing themselves of the very cheapest conveyance, the “_waggons_,” instead of a fair proportion, as had been anticipated, travelling by the first and second class carriages. The enterprise, he conceives to have been unwisely expanded into the present stupendous system, when the original idea of effecting a rapid communication with Germany across Belgium, independent of Holland, would have achieved the grand object aimed at, with a less expense. This was a sacrifice of solid advantages to ostentation, and has been followed by financial disappointment; but it arose in some degree, from the national desire to give independent Belgium an important prestige in the eyes of Europe. “The _Chemin de Fer_ is then the more popular in Belgium, adds M. B., because the people can see the intimate connexion between its construction and the events of 1830; _without the revolution, we should have had no railroad, and without the railroad we should have been better without the revolution_.”[9] Louvain, the Oxford, or rather the _Maynooth_ of Belgium is a miserable, dilapidated old town, with narrow streets and an air of dirt and desolation. Four hundred years ago, it was a place of wealth and importance, the capital of the ancient duchy of Brabant, and the residence of its sovereigns before its incorporation with the territory of Burgundy. Justus Lipsius, himself a citizen of Louvain, and born in a little hamlet between it and Brussels, records, on the authority of some old tradition, that in 1360 there were within the walls from 3,000 to 4,000 cloth workers, who gave employment to 150,000 artizans, (an evident exaggeration in amount, that attests, however, the fame of its past prosperity), and the story adds, that at the hours of meals, the great bell of St. Peter’s was sounded to warn parents to keep their children within doors, lest they should be crushed and trampled by the crowds who were passing from their workshops to their homes! At present, its manufactures are at an end, with the exception of its beer, whose fame is known throughout the Netherlands, its population is dwindled to 25,000, and even within the circuit of the walls, large spaces covered with buildings are now converted into fields or cultivated as market gardens for the supply of the citizens.