Belgium was the most thickly peopled state in Europe. In the Meuse valley, from Liége to Seraing, she possessed the most extensive manufacturing area of its size in the world, surpassing Lancashire and Massachusetts. She had a greater length of railway line per square mile than any other country in Europe. She produced a greater value of manufactured goods _per capita_ than either of her great neighbours, France and Germany, and had a larger _per capita_ foreign trade. Her agriculture was so enterprising that it would have been difficult to find an untilled rood or a rood wasted on a fence, in all Flanders. Such production of wealth had generated on a large scale all the social problems characteristic of our time; and so earnest and loyal was she in her attempt to reach solutions that French writers have been found to call her, not the “cockpit,” but the “social laboratory” of Europe. What is of special interest to us is that, despite the ablest Socialist and Liberal criticism, Belgium had maintained in power for a generation a Catholic Government, and was working out her problems on the basis of Catholic individualism. In all aspects to know her was for a citizen of any small nation a tonic and an inspiration. She was no Paradise assuredly; she had failed in some points in which we have succeeded, but it was impossible to look into any department of her activity without learning something worth the trouble. When it is remembered that, on the one hand, she had a duality of language, and on the other, that through flax she came into intimate touch with North-east Ulster, the interest of her life for an Irishman is obviously enhanced. Coal, “the bread of manufacturing industry,” was, of course, the basis of Belgian prosperity. In her black country, the “borinage” centred on Mons. She employed 150,000 miners, raised 24,000,000 tons of coal per annum, and consumed almost that quantity in her factories and homes. I have an eerie recollection of climbing the belfry of Mons some years ago, and picking out, or persuading myself that I had succeeded in picking out, the battlefields about it: Malplaquet, Jemappes, Fontenoy, Ligny. A Frenchman on the same errand asked dreamily: “When will there be another?” Alas! we can answer that question now: the “borinage” has taken another full draught of Irish blood. This precious natural possession of coal Belgium certainly utilises to the full. Her mining country, unhappily, had all the sordor that seems inseparable from that enterprise. Mons had an admirable School of Commerce and Industry. Its watchword was expansion and expatriation. The device may sound strange in our ears; what it means to convey, of course, is that Belgium must find markets abroad. She trains her sons not to be lost to her, but to go abroad and open new fields of conquest for her industries. There was also an unusual dispensary which treated the miners for an endemic complaint called “miner’s worm,” or more learnedly, ankylostomiasis.