South Germany, Denmark, and even Hungary have been ransacked for models by various Irish propagandists, Belgian agriculture, which was not inferior either in technique or in organisation, was almost ignored. Much of the land is, as with us, rather a manufactured article than a natural product; rich polders stolen from the sea, or sand made fertile by irrigation. If one were to touch on any special point in agriculture, it would be the complete success which Belgium had made of the beet. She produced all her own sugar, including that used in her great brewing industry, and exported great quantities as well.
The productive apparatus of Belgium was assuredly rich and varied. And each industry fed and maintained itself by an educational institute of the first order. Mons has been mentioned. There was also the University of Liége, mainly an engineering University; the great Commercial School of Antwerp, the Agricultural Laboratories at Louvain and Ghent, the Higher School of Textiles at Verviers, and so on. And all this was done at "the cross-roads of Europe," under the fire of French and German competition, without recourse to any really protectionist tariffs.
But however dominant a factor intensity of production may be, it is rather the attitude of a people towards the problems of distribution that marks it out as, in a human point of view, a success or a failure: Belgium was beyond doubt a success.
