For all that, it did not work out very well in practice. The educated upper classes were not always disinterested, and they were nearly always conservative. Poor men are naturally adventurous when they see a chance for gain, but when comfortable they are more and more inclined to hang back, reluctant to risk their present comfort for any hazardous improvement. The story of a young captain of militia who got separated from his company in a strike riot and cried--"Where are my men? I am their leader--I must follow them!" illustrates this point. There was a lively agitation for electoral reform while we were there. At the root of much of the political strife was the question of schools. Should the Church share with the State in the education of the children, or should the public schools be purely secular? The coalition of liberal parties demanded for every child up to fourteen years of age a compulsory education, which must be followed by two years of training along some technical line. They insisted, moreover, that every commune should be bound to provide adequate schools, from which both religion and politics must be barred. Although they never achieved this, the steady gain of the coalition in recent years has been attributed to their stand in educational matters. The Belgian Constitution provides for two kinds of schools, State and "free." The latter, corresponding to private schools in our country, were not under Government control, and were, indeed, generally under the management of the clergy. Prior to 1878 the Church had also, step by step, gained a certain amount of influence in the State schools, but in that year the Liberals came into power and suppressed clerical inspection. As a result of this, six years later, the Liberals went down to defeat and did not regain their power. From that time on, the curriculum of the State schools included religious instruction, although it was not compulsory. It seems strange now to remember that only a very short time ago one of the burning issues in Belgium was militarism. Then they were facing much the same question which is before us today in this country: Should they have a large standing army, with all the burden of service and taxation that it entailed, or should they try the system in use in Switzerland? There every man is equipped, and drilled for a short time each year, but there is only a very small regular army. The Belgians compromised by blocking up all the entrances to their country by means of strong fortifications, with the idea that no invader would gain enough by crossing their territory to make it worth the trouble. If they had had the army too, the story might have had a somewhat different ending.