With the active support of the State, provident societies and savings banks exist to foster habits of thrift. A co-operative society, “The People,” in Ghent, has a membership of many thousands of families. It operates a bakery, a bank, a theater, and numerous stores and mills. “The Peasants’ Union” owns assets valued at ten million dollars. Trained advisers are employed by the Union to travel among the farmers and suggest improved methods of raising crops and livestock. In point of individual savings, Belgium held a place high on the list of nations before the War. Belgium was a veritable hive of contented, thrifty workers before the German hordes crossed her borders. And today, after more than four years of exhaustive warfare and abysmal suffering, the nation is again rising to renew her forces, just as, so often in the past, she has been constrained to rise and gird her industrial armor on after long periods of oppression and abuse. In 1914 there were but five other countries whose foreign trade was greater; in her output of steel, glass, railway rolling stock, beet sugar and textiles, she could hold her own with bigger rivals. Half her people were engaged in manufacturing and allied pursuits, and half in the cultivation of the soil. Antwerp, “safest harbor on the Continent,” ranked next to New York among the ports of the world. [Illustration: MONUMENTS ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF WATERLOO] When King Albert returned to his capital after a tragic exile, this is what he found: the Government railways, interurban lines and canals almost entirely out of commission; the harbor of Antwerp closed; three hundred thousand subjects homeless; scores of factories totally destroyed or too badly damaged to operate; and sixteen hundred coke furnaces, so vital to the manufacture of steel, completely demolished. The national debt had more than quadrupled, and eight hundred thousand laborers, through enforced idleness, were receiving their support from the Government. [Illustration: A LACE WORKER In a community of nuns, Bruges. The long-armed stove and the fireplace are characteristic of most Flemish cottages.] _The Redemption of Belgium_