The year that we were there, there was much fear as to the result of the elections. The talk was such as to make you feel that the end of the world was at hand if the Clericals failed to win, and that if they did win, there would surely be a revolution. Our own papers had greatly exaggerated accounts of the trouble in Brussels following the elections, with stories of sieges and revolutions and all kinds of violence. But although the riots themselves amounted to little, they were of such significance as a part of the general social and political unrest throughout the world that I insert an account of them here. The general elections were held in Belgium on Sunday, the second of June, 1913, and resulted in the maintenance in power of the clerical conservative Government. The dissolution had been brought about by the gradually diminishing majority of the Clericals in Parliament till they had kept themselves in office by an excess in the Chamber of Deputies of only six votes. It was expected that the elections would be very close, owing to the alliance which had been formed for this campaign between the two opposition parties of Liberals and Socialists. It was the surprise of the election that the returns for the new Parliament showed a substantial gain for the party in power. It seemed that the Clericals had come back from the country with a majority of sixteen in the Chamber, while in the Senate their supremacy was also maintained. An explanation of these gains was afterwards found in the defection of many Liberals at the last moment because they feared the alliance with the Socialists and preferred, after all, as the lesser of the two evils, the Clerical ministry, such as Belgium had prospered under for nearly thirty years. Liberal officers of the army could not bear alliance with the anti-monarchical party, moreover, and the high finance and commerce--the Liberal bourgeoisie--feared radical changes. The defeated parties raised the cry of corruption, and of the advantage which the plural vote gave the government forces, since it was the educated and official classes and the rural population which benefited by the allowance of a second or third vote. Afterwards a more active campaign than ever was waged in favour of the "one man, one vote" suffrage by those out of power. Throughout the rural communities the Clericals developed a well-organized machine in the "Boerenbonden," or agricultural syndicates, which might have been subventions of the Government but were generally in the hands of the priests.