But she was facing her social task in the right temper. The Belgian in economic affairs is by nature a realist and an appeasable man. In the number of days per worker lost through labour disputes, Belgium was easily at the foot of the list of industrial countries. “The Social Question,” they repeat after Colins, “is to be settled by science, not by violence.” Time and again the central labour committees, Socialist as well as Catholics, have suppressed strikes inaugurated by their own members. This realism of outlook gave you in Belgium the supreme type of business-like politics. The great Socialist co-operatives of Brussels and Ghent--the “Maison du Peuple” and the “Voormit”--starting from ludicrously small beginnings, bestrode the world of workers like a Colossus. If you were an associate, they sold you your clothes, boots, bread, meat, beer, furniture, books, amusements--everything you consumed--and managed your business as well as gave you free their propagandist papers, and an annual bonus out of the profits, in order to sweeten the principles proposed. The smaller Catholic organisations in the cities acted on similar lines. In the country the great Catholic “Boerenbond,” or Land League, with its headquarters at Louvain, applied the same formula to the buying and selling of agricultural necessaries on a great scale. Such a phenomenon as empty extremism could not arise. These immense co-operatives were, perhaps, the most characteristic Belgian contribution to social readjustment. But in direct action by the State they had also been pioneers. The first experiment in Old Age Pensions did not come from Germany--formerly the worshipped idol of English Liberals and Tariff Reformers alike. It came from the city of Ghent. The first experiment in the deliberate building of “workmen’s dwellings” as such was not made in Mülhausen, it was made in Verviers. The whole body of Belgian law regulating economic life is expounded in two masterly volumes issued from Louvain by Father Vermeersh, the Jesuit, who so bravely exposed the early atrocities in the Congo. (Perhaps it is as well to interpolate here that if the crimes were great, the amendment has been complete. On the same terms it would be possible to forgive all the sins of history.) The intervention of formal law is not quite as comprehensive as it is in these countries. But it helps the worker at all his crises: birth, marriage, accident, disease, old age. In one respect at least it is far superior to our code: property in small parcels is much more readily accessible to the labourer. This is accomplished by exemption of workmen’s home sites and garden plots from various heads of taxation, and by the provision of cheap loans. It will be found in the end that this accessibility to land, to land in fee-simple, is the real solution of half our labour difficulties, and the real counter-programme to Socialism. And the nation that pioneered it will enjoy deserved honour. Like other Latin