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 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,"