Whether this means the apotheosis of the general strike in Belgium will depend no doubt upon circumstances, it is significant that the words were uttered, and still more significant that political coalition has taken the place of industrial warfare. The Liberals and Radicals now plan with the Socialists. They no longer stand aside and let the Socialists march, but they join step with them and carry banners. The greatest of all Belgian demonstrations for universal suffrage and free schools took place in August, 1911. In spite of the extreme heat, nearly 200,000 Radicals, Liberals, and Socialists gathered in the capital, "not so much to impress the government," a Socialist leader said to me, "but to impress the people that we are in earnest, and then to prepare for the coming elections." IV It must not be inferred from this rapid survey of its warfare for political privilege that Belgian Socialism has forgotten the co-operative movement and all the various activities that were blended in the making of the Labor Party. Belgian Socialism is primarily economic. This makes it unique. It has succeeded in becoming economic, in building dairies and bake-shops, in running dry-goods stores and grocery stores and butcher shops, in the present dispensation; and it has succeeded in doing so by accommodating itself to the present conditions. It adopts the eight-hour day when it can, but it is not averse to ten hours when necessary. It pays its employees the highest wage it can, but it recognizes talent and ability like the bourgeois shopkeeper across the street. It has insurance funds that draw interest at the same rate that is paid by bourgeois banks, and it has no scruples about putting the latest approved machinery into its workshops and bakeries. In all this, their activities have remained Socialistic. They compete with the bourgeois, but co-operate among themselves. The profits of their activities go to the members of their societies and to the party. Their competition has brought ruin to the door of many a shopkeeper who finds his customers flocking to their own shop. Government commissions have inquired into the movement at the nervous requests of merchants and tradesmen, but only to find every co-operative enterprise carefully conducted and thriving.