 Chapter 11 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter The servant problem hardly exists for an American housekeeper living in France. From her point of view, wages are not high, and moreover, the servants expect to work for what they get. The general servant is a live institution. She often does the cooking, cleaning, and bed-making for a family of three or four persons. She blacks the shoes, mends the linen, and presses the suits of her master and mistress. She thinks she is well treated if she has a half-day off every other Sunday, and she expects no time for herself during the week. The chambermaid does all the mending and sometimes makes dresses for the ladies of the family. She gets a commission on the clothes bought by her madam. One of these chambermaids may clean a whole house, serve the table, and take care of the children. Not uncommonly, she will dress her mistress's hair and otherwise assist with the elaborate toilet the French madame considers the thing. The French cook does the marketing, and she counts upon it because of the commission she gets from the dealer, who may pay as much as five cents for every dollar spent in his shop. Here are some notes I made last Sunday morning while watching the servants going to market. The streets are full of women and girls, most of them without hats and all plainly dressed. Each has a basket and net bag in her hand. Wagons of green stuff move through the streets. The provision and grocery stores are open, and many of the streets are lined with stands surrounded by customers. The usual marketing time is from 9 to 11 o'clock, and even before 9, one sees some of the servants returning. The market is their chief meeting place. They like to go at the same time every day, for it is there that they chat with their friends. The quantities bought are small. A bunch of red carrots, a white cauliflower, a dozen potatoes, a little meat, and the inevitable bottle of ordinary wine may be all that fills the net bag of the buyer. The wages that they are considered excessive just now are nothing compared with those received in the United States. A cook gets from $14 to $30 a month. The latter wage is paid only by the rich, and the man or woman who runs the kitchen is expected to make fancy cakes, desserts, and elaborate dishes. In a household of four or five persons of moderate means where there is some entertaining, the cook's wage is about $17 a month. The hours for meals are different from those in America. In France, business starts later, and the people rise later. The average Parisian shop is not open before 9 or 10 o'clock, and most shops are closed from 12 until half past 1 or 2. This is for luncheon, a very important meal because the first breakfast of coffee and rolls is so light. The people say the long lunch hour gives them a chance to have a visit with their families, but the American residents here miss the long evenings and the time we have for exercise in the late afternoon. Almost every French businessman of affairs goes home to lunch. He expects two hours off at that time, but when he comes back to his desk at 2.30, he stays there until well after 6. This makes the dining hour late, and even in modest homes, the family seldom eats dinner until half past 7 o'clock. Our help would consider this a hardship, but the French servants do not expect to be through with their work until around 10 o'clock. Some American housekeepers in Paris try to reform the habits of the French servants, but it is wiser to let them do things their own way. For instance, the dishes from the breakfast of coffee rolls and jam, which one has upon rising, are left to be washed with the lunch dishes of the middle of the day. It is hard to convince servants why they should be washed at once, and there are others of our customs which they will not adopt. They would rather get down on their knees and put superfluous elbow grease on the hardwood floors than stand up and use a long-handled polisher. They insist that the latter does not give a good finish. Many of the housekeeping details are different from ours. An important one is the lack of ice in summer. Only the very rich have ice boxes, and there are but few ice wagons making deliveries every day. The ice from my baby granddaughter is bought from the butcher, who charges five cents a pound. My daughter tells me that many French families keep the baby's milk fresh by leaving it in running water or in the cellar if they have one. All milk is boiled the moment it is brought into the house, and such a thing as giving a baby fresh uncooked milk is unheard of. I am interested in the washing arrangements of Paris. Most of the people living in these apartment houses have such small quarters that there is no room for a laundry. For this reason they are forced to send out their soiled linen, and the prices are surprisingly high. For a family of two, the bills may be as much as six or eight dollars a week for a laundry, not including the fine things washed by the cook. The laundry of the baby is always done at home. The washing done outside looks well at first, but the washer women put a powder into their water that rots the clothes as it cleans them. For several years the cost of living has been steadily rising, and the large number of French families who are dependent upon fixed incomes from houses or bonds have great trouble to make ends meet, although they have cut their living expenditures in half. One sees types of this class everywhere on the boulevards. A man will carry a smart stick hooked over his arm, although his well-brushed clothes are shiny and his blackened shoes run down at the heel. Nevertheless, to use a common expression, he puts on a good front and buckles his belt a bit tighter. I heard a story today from an American woman who has a servant that came from a family which was well to do a few years ago. She gave up the place because she did not have enough food to keep soul and body together. The family has an elegant apartment in one of the most exclusive sections of Paris. The building is of white stone, and in the neighborhood are many of the nobility. They lease the apartment at before-the-war rates, and the furniture of their better days enable them to keep up appearances, but they lack money for food. Their meals are almost bar-masidal, and the menu never varies. For luncheon each person has a slice of meat about two inches wide and three inches long and some rice or potatoes. For supper or dinner, as it is called here, they have a soup and a vegetable. There is no dessert. They never taste the bits of cheese of which the French are so fond and rarely eat any of the better green vegetables. One daughter of the house who is supposed to be anemic is given a slice of meat in the evening, but the others have none. The girl said the servants had even less to eat and could not endure it. Nevertheless, this family dwells in surroundings as beautiful as those of people with ten times its income. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of From France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Restaurants and Cafes, the Alps Paris has more than 10,000 hotels and there are restaurants in every block and cafes at almost every step. At nearly all the restaurants one is sure of good cooking and he can dine well anywhere and at almost any price. In the high-class places, the meals cost as much as in the best hotels of New York, and when one orders a la carte, he can easily run up the bill for his dinner, even without wines, to five dollars. Half a fried chicken will cost him three dollars. I had a little side dish of asparagus yesterday at the Continental Hotel that cost fourteen francs, and judging by the price of green peas on the menu, they ought to bring the French farmer ten dollars a bushel. A small section of a cantaloupe, one-eighth, I should say, is priced at one dollar, and a fat, rosy peach costs fifty cents. In this and similar places, one can get a table-dote meal for two or three dollars, but most Americans prefer to lunch and dine a la carte. In the cheaper restaurants, one gets a good dinner for fifty or seventy-five cents, including a small bottle of red or white wine. At the cafes, which are really saloons without bars, where coffee, syrups, lemonade, beer, wines, and liqueurs are served upon tables, either inside or out on the sidewalk, the prices range from ten cents upward per drink, and if one is a gentleman, he will give two cents or more as a tip to the waiter. If he does not, the waiter may ask it. The usual tip is about ten percent of each order. The cafes are one of the features of Paris. They are frequented by men and women, and also by families. They are the clubs where friends meet day after day at the same hour and often at the same table. Here one reads his newspaper or chats, or plays chess or checkers. The cafe is also a favorite meeting place where one can write a letter on paper provided by the establishment, until his sweetheart or wife keeps her appointment. Many of them have music at certain hours, and some have songs and dances. They are to be found in every part of Paris, especially on the boulevards, near the railway stations, and on the main thoroughfares. The first breakfast, consisting of coffee or tea and bread and butter, is served in many cafes, and in some one can have a substantial meal. They are usually open as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and many serve drinks until two hours after midnight. There is no city in Europe that eats more per person and has better food or such a variety of good things on its tables as Paris. The Parisians consume many millions of pounds of fish every year. They annually eat 11,000 tons of oysters and vegetables, and about 30 million pounds of excellent butter. They consume 40 million pounds of fruit, a large part of which comes from Spain and Algeria, and they eat so much cheese obtained from all parts of Europe that it would take about 35,000 horses to haul it in wagons over one of the rough roads of the states. In order to see just how the French tables are provided, we shall spend this morning in the Al Centrale, which comprise perhaps the largest market house in the world. Covent Garden in London does not cover half as much ground, and the markets of Berlin, New York, and Vienna are small in comparison. And still, this is not the only market of Paris. There are smaller ones scattered here and there throughout the city. There are market stores everywhere, and outside the walls all sorts of eatables are displayed for sale at lower rates than inside. As the dealers there do not have to pay the octwag tax charged upon everything that comes in. The Al Centrale are in the heart of the city, not far from the Seine, and within a stone's throw the Louvre. They consist of 10 huge pavilions made of iron and glass, each large enough for a great exposition. They cover more than 22 acres and have more than 3,000 different stalls. Between the pavilions run covered streets and under the halls are sellers for the storage of goods. The front pavilions are chiefly for retailers, while those behind are for the wholesale trade, which in the early morning overflows into the streets. The Congressional Library at Washington, one of the fine buildings of the world, costs $6 million, and our national capital, which covers half as much ground as the Al, costs about $13 million. The Al are mere shells, but they cost $10 million when they were built, and it would take twice that to produce them today. They belong to the city, to which the market people pay rent for their stalls. The business of supplying the Al begin at 9 or 10 o'clock every night, when heavily laden wagons, carts, and trucks containing all sorts of eatables begin coming into the city. Not so long ago, many of the farmers brought in their produce in wheelbarrows and small donkey carts. They had also huge carts holding one or two tons and hauled by percheron horses hitched tandem. The latter are still to be seen, though they are fast being replaced by motor trucks and by steam locomotives, which haul boxcars through the city. Our visit to the Al is made at 5 o'clock in the morning. We get there in time to see the wholesale selling, which lasts only from 3 until 8 a.m. The sales are by auction, meat, vegetables, and fish being knocked down in lots to the highest bidders. As we enter the Al, we pass men carrying all sorts of things in and out. Some have on hats as big around as a parasol, and resting upon them are crates of suckling pigs, fowls, and rabbits. Some carry a whole sheep or a hog on their backs. Most of these porters wear the red stocking caps of their profession, and also long butcher's aprons, once white, but now stained and bloody. Others bring in great baskets of vegetables. Everyone is pushing this way and that, and we are hustled and jostled about as we make our way through. We stop first at the Fowl Hall, where chicken, ducks, and rabbits are sold by the crate. There are thousands of partridges and pheasants and other game of all sorts. About each auctioneer stands a crowd of French peasants, the men wearing short coats and long baggy corduroy trousers, and the women black shawls and long full black skirts, all bid loudly for the various lots. The auctioneers knock down the goods rapidly. It takes 30 seconds to sell a crate of suckling pigs and less for one of chickens or ducks. In this part of the market, butter and eggs are auctioned. The eggs come in great boxes which are stacked on the floor. Each box contains 1,000 eggs, and the stock on hand this morning totals millions. I stop later at one of the retail stands and ask the price of eggs. They bring 7 or 8 cents and upward a piece, or 70 or 80 cents a dozen. On a farm 80 miles from Paris, I recently bought some for half that amount. These French know how to use eggs. They make delicious egg dishes which are hardly known in America, and as a result the egg consumption of Paris is enormous. The eggs are usually good. I have yet to get a bad one, and most of them are open to the objection of the news boy when he refused his first fresh egg served during a trip in the country. He said, Taint right, it don't smell and it ain't got no taste. It is the same with the butter. It is made without salt and was therefore be good or will not keep long. Here in the market it is sold at wholesale in 22 pound balls. What is that smell wafted to our nostrils from over the way? It has a cheesy nature, although it lacks the authority of Limburger. You cross over and enter another great pavilion where the auctioneers are selling cheeses of every description. They have them made from sheep or goat's milk, camembert, roquefort, gorgonzola and brie, and the little rolls of petite suites which are soft as unworked butter. There are also the white wagon wheels of Gruyere and the red balls of Edum cheese from Holland. Our next walk is among the fishwives who have a whole pavilion. Each woman has marble counters about her on which are set out almost every eatable thing that swims in the sea or crawls on the land. The fish are laid out in neat rows and fresh mackerel is sold at 25 cents a pound. There are great lobsters so displayed that they look like a regiment drawn up for review. And there are also vats of running water in which eels are squirming about. If you want to buy one the woman will dip out a net full and let you take your choice. As we wait the guy tells us that the eels are all caught outside of Paris because the river sand here is so winding they will not enter the city for fear of breaking their backs. You remember the old nursery rhyme? What are little boys made of? Frogs and sails and puppy dog tails? That's what little boys are made of. And what are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. That's what little girls are made of. Well, about all these things are for sale in the Al Central. I will not vouch for the puppy dog tails although I know they are eaten in China or I have seen them cooking over the fire in the restaurants of Canton on the ends of the dog carcasses being baked for the diners. But as to frogs and snails nowhere are more eaten than right here in fastidious France. The frogs are brought to the market both dead and alive. In preparing them the hind legs and a part of the back are cut off and skinned. The legs are then strung by the dozen on a wooden stick to be sold at so much a bunch. The frog industry is quite important to France. There are 117 different kinds of frogs and the two especially edible ones are the green and the red. The green frog is the one most eaten. It is found wherever there are swamps or ponds and on the margins of rivers and in bays that contain fresh or only silently brackish water. It feeds on worms flies and insects and especially on the spawn and small fry of fish. The Paris supply comes mostly from the neighborhood and from southwestern France and Lorraine. The red frog is of a reddish brown color modeled with green and brown spots. It lives mainly on the land and takes to the water only in winter and during the spawning season. It loves damp locations near ponds and water courses. The American bullfrog is not known here. It is larger than the French frog and the French who have tasted it say it is superior to theirs. But come with me and look at the snails. Over there is a booth with a great golden snail hanging above it and boxes of live snails on the counter. The smaller ones bring 30 cents per 100 but the fat ones sell for double that price. They do not look appetizing to me as they crawl about in their boxes but the French think they are perfectly delicious when served hot with melted butter. The snails are served in the shell like oysters. They are picked out with tiny forks and well chewed before swallowing. I find them not bad to taste but for me quite indigestible. Paris eats almost 2 million pounds of snails like these every year. Snail raising is a regular business and I understand that half a million of the first quality can be grown on one acre of ground. They are fed once a day usually in the evening. They are particularly hungry after a rain when a bed of 100,000 snails will consume a wheelbarrow load of cabbage. Some of the best are fed also on wine drags or brand soaked in wine to give them a special flavor just as our best chickens have a milk diet and our finest flavored hams are from peanut fed hogs. The snails are kept in houses during the winter. There are farmers in the department of Jura who raise 2 million snails every year. I am told they ship them to the United States and to parts of Latin America. The snails usually cross the ocean alive in November or December and must be carefully handled to withstand the voyage. Switzerland also is a famous snail market. It has its exporters and farmers and its crop is especially popular. Leaving the snails we go to the flower market located between two of the largest pavilions. Here flowers are sold at prices that the ordinary customer can pay. I see roses at 3 cents apiece bouquets of sweet peas for 10 cents and carnations for little more. The stalls have every kind of flower one can imagine and they come in from all over the Republic. Many are raised in the gardens and hothouses near Paris but during the winter a special train popularly called the Cut Flower Limited Express brings flowers from southern France to this city. It has 10 cars at the start and some of these are switched off here to Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. One car goes to Brussels and another to Calais where it crosses the channel on a ferry to supply the markets of London and Manchester. A great many flowers are sent by parcel post from the same region. The total is more than a million packages of cut flowers per annum and the value is in the neighborhood of 8 million dollars. But how about Hooch asks one of the bibulous men of our party as he quotes from Bishop John Still who lived at the time when the monks had great reputations as wine bibbers. I cannot eat but little meat. My stomach is not good but sure I think that I can drink with him that wears a hood. In reply we are led to a great pavilion piled high with casks, barrels and cases of wines and liquors of every variety. The soil of much of France is just right for grapes and the wines excel any produced upon earth since old Noah began to be a husband man and planted a vineyard on the slopes of Mount Ararat. A million and a half people are employed in grape growing and the French vintage has for years brought in more than a third of a billion dollars per year. In France almost everyone drinks wine and employing a house servant one must provide a bottle of ordinary wine per day as a part of his or her food. Before it is taken the wine is usually mixed with water and it is so light that it is claimed there is but little drunkenness in France. This is true with respect to intoxication of the rip-roaring stage when seldom sees a man reeling along the street as is common in some parts of London and drunken women are nowhere in evidence. Nevertheless the French peasants drink a great deal of wine and often consume much stronger liquors. Some of them patronize the cafes and saloons to such an extent that they are sodden with liquor a great part of the time. And it is very much a question whether the use of light wines and beers is as conducive to temperance as some people claim. Until recently France had practically a monopoly of the wine export trade. One of her chief markets was the United States and our prohibition laws have seriously affected the industry. It has decreased the exports of France to America by something like four million dollars a year. And now about the only wine exports are champagnes which have been flowing into America to the value of about one hundred thousand dollars per month on the grounds that they are needed for medicine. And this brings me to the champagne sellers of rest which sheltered so many people during the war in which for generations have supplied most of the champagne consumed in the world. During the war the buildings of the great wine factories were destroyed but the sellers were unharmed as the Germans occupied the city only a week and their shells did no damage to the great cave like excavations in the chalk rock. The result is that the sellers are practically intact so that the industry did not suffer permanent injury. During my stay in rest last week I visited one of these wine catacombs walking through mile after mile of the tunnels which cross each other this way and that forming great avenues far under the ground each walled with bottles of champagne. The establishment was that of the palmery company whose champagne we all knew before a great drought began. It has eleven million bottles now in the making and the underground passages in which the wine lies curing are more than ten miles in length. I went through the tunnels with the manager of the company and as we inspected these long avenues of bottles he told me a little about how champagne is made. His story explains the high cost of the wine. It is made of black grapes which came from forty different vineyards in the champagne country. The grapes are first pressed and the skins removed. The white juices then blended in a mighty hog's head or a ton which holds twenty thousand gallons of liquor. As I stood beside it at the entrance to the caves it towered above me like a house. Accepting the huge ton at Heidelberg, Germany it is the world's largest wine pot. The blending continues six months and after that the liquor takes from four to six years to run through the process that makes it into champagne. The fermentation goes on in the bottles which are set in racks in which after four or five years are shaken every day for six weeks to get the sediment down to the cork. The sediment is then artificially frozen and taken out as a small cake of ice. After that some sweetening is added or some special liquor put in to give the desired flavor. The bottle is then recorked under great pressure and packed away. One year later it is ready for sale. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of From France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This LibraVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. A ghost that frightens the French. The ghost that frightens all France is a baby. Its first name is Hans and it is marked made in Germany. More babies born over the Rhine every year than in this land of the Sin and five times more births than deaths. Moreover the French birth rate is dropping. In the days of Napoleon the average number was four to the family. It is now two or less and the death of the million and a half young men killed in the war will make the babies still fewer. As it is now there are nearly two million families which have no children at all. Three million which have only one child and two and a half million each of which has but two children. The population of Germany is increasing five times as fast. In 1872 France had about 36 million people and in the 50 years since then she has gained only four millions. While Germany starting with the population France has at present has made a gain of 15 millions and that in spite of her great emigration to America and other parts of the world. It is estimated that at the present rate in 1975 France will have only 41 million people to Germany's 100 million. Even with the increased number of marriages following the war the living children born number around 800,000 a year as against one million for the year 1865. For a long time the natural increase of the Germans has been more than a million per annum. You remember that General von Molki once said that every year the Germans gained a battle over the French by the annual addition to their population of one million souls. A member of the French Institute said not long ago that France is losing four Army Corps every 15 years. Within recent years more than one-sixth of all the babies born in the Republic have not reached the age of 12 months and one-third of this sixth died during the first month after birth. The death rate of French infants their first year is from 15 to 20 percent or one baby in every five, six or seven. But let us look into some of the reasons of the small baby crop of France. In the first place I would say that I do not believe that the lack of babies comes from any physical weakness in the Latin races. The Latins as a rule have fewer children than Anglo-Saxons. But when the French came to Canada they brought forth as many children as the famous old woman who lived in a shoe who had so many children she didn't know what to do. Given illustration of the birth rate of the French Canadians the government of Quebec some years ago offered 100 acres of land to every father of a family having 12 or more living children. On the day appointed more than 700 claimants came forward to get the farms. As to celibacy among the Latins from the earliest times it has been discouraged. The old Romans levied fines on bachelors and adopted measures to increase marriage. Louis XIV and Napoleon both granted special exemptions and favors to parents having more than two children. One of the great causes of the lack of babies in France today is the thrift of the people. Many feel too poor to marry and some who are married do not want children on account of the high cost of living. Yesterday I talked with my taxi driver about existing conditions. He was bitter on the subject of poverty. Said he, when I got married I told my wife we would never have any children. I was one of a family of eight in Northern France. My father was poor and my youth was all kicks and blows with little to eat. I ran away from home and now well here I am driving a taxi. It's not much of a life. It is so uncertain. I earn about 900 francs a month but that is hardly enough for myself and my wife. Anyway I am not going to run the risk of making a little child suffer as I did when I was little. And there are a lot of us who feel the same way. Look at those men working in that ditch over there. They earn 20 francs a day. How can they support a family on that? The rich should have the large families now. We poor cannot afford them and anyway we know what the life of a poor child is like. Speaking of the rich and the poor reminds me of a French beggar who applied for aid to a pompous French philanthropist on the grounds that he had a large family of young children. The sanctimonious rich man replied, The Lord never sends mouths but that he sends bread to fill them. That is true, answered the beggar, but he has sent the mouths to my house and the bread to yours. The custom of giving a dowry to a daughter when she is married has an important effect on the birth rate of France. The girl who has no dot has great difficulty in getting a husband and no couple wants to risk having more daughters than it can furnish with decent dowries. Indeed financial questions play a large part in the matrimonial arrangements. The French draw fine distinction between love and marriage. Most of them regard love more or less as a personal matter, whereas marriage is a social necessity. One should love his wife or her husband, but the happiness of the children and parents will be more sure if it is based upon certain roles of business and conduct. Love is a passion which may go as it came, but marriage must endure and it should have enough to support it. For this reason a French marriage depends largely upon the consent of the family and the state of the finances of the parties to the contract. If a man is an orphan he must get the permission of his grandparents in order to marry. They will look into the social and financial situation of the girl and the relatives of both parties will arrange the transaction. Indeed such consent is absolutely necessary up to the age of 5 and 20. No man can marry until he is 17 years of age, but girls may marry when they have reached the age of 15 or 16. It is uncommon for a young man to get married until he has completed his term in the army. The French laws of inheritance form another obstruction to the fight of the storks bringing new babies to France. All children, boys and girls alike must have equal shares of their parents' estates. The daughters often get their portions in their dowries when they are married and the rest of the children have theirs at the death of the parents. The greater part of the land of France is in very small holdings and such equal division makes the patches and scraps of which I have spoken already. Often each boy will want some of his land facing the road and what is a large field of the father becomes mere ribbons when parceled out to the sons. In order to prevent such division parents keep down the number of children and thus leave a sizable portion to each. The peasant loves his land and his ideal is a single heir married to a single heiress, therefore he leaves only one or two children. Attempts have been made to change this inheritance law so as to give the father the right to will away his estate as he pleases. If this can be accomplished it is claimed that the birth rate will increase. Some authorities suggest an inheritance tax of 30% on all estates when there are only two children and of 60% when there is only one. This means that the man with one child would leave to the government all but 40% of his savings. Another load on the wings of the bird that carries the babies is, it is asserted, the great amount of alcohol consumed by the French. The average per capita is about 14 quarts every year and in certain cities of Normandy it is twice that much. Statistics show that a large percentage of the inmates of the French insane asylums and hospitals are drunkards. And the scientists claim that alcoholism is contributing to the weakening of the race in more ways than one. Some say it is lessening the number of births but this is questionable for many of the nations who drink much have a far higher birth rate. The British, for instance, who are great drinkers have one-third more babies per thousand than the French. And the Russians, who are addicted to vodka, have a birth rate of 44 to the thousand while France has only 12. Other contributory causes are said to be the decline of religion, the employment of women in factories and compulsory army service. The state watches the advent of every new infant and as soon as it comes a government doctor inspects it. If it is a boy, his name goes down at once as a future soldier of France. Indeed, there is no way for a boy born in France to escape. No matter if his parents be American or of any other nationality, into the army list he must go if he has been born on French soil. For this reason, foreign mothers often cross the channel to England to have their babies born there. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of From France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Increasing the baby crop. All France is now planning new ways for saving the babies and increasing the crop. The facts I have given in the preceding chapter have stirred up the French government, the captains of industry, the intellectuals, and even the peasants, and all are at work on the problem. For years the government has been enacting laws with the view to increasing the French population. Some time ago it passed one which gave an annual allowance for every poor family which had more than three children. The amount of the allowance, which was fixed by the communes, ranged from eleven to seventeen dollars ahead. Later on bills were introduced into the French Senate making physical education compulsory for girls as well as for boys. And this included plans to acquire lands and buildings to be used for physical training. Another law sought to modify the marriage code so that one could marry without the consent of his parents and grandparents. And another proposed that the word obey be taken out of the woman's part of the marriage contract. To the latter many of the women's journals were especially hostile declaring that it would lead to anarchy in the home. The Department of Ardennes in northern France has adopted an ordinance which is being urged elsewhere in the country by the National Alliance for increasing the population of France. Under this measure the unmarried mother may conceal her identity or any woman may enter a public maternity hospital, have her baby and leave the institution with her child without having revealed her name. The prospective mother need only fill out a form giving her name, address, place of birth and age together with the name and address of the person she wishes notified in case of her death. This is sealed up in a numbered envelope and the hospital authorities know the woman only by her number. The association takes the ground that France needs babies too badly to neglect any mothers whether married or unmarried. Other laws have been suggested. One is the taxation of bachelors and another the taxation of married men who have not become fathers. There is a movement to curtail the taxes on the large families and in some places gold medals are given for more babies. For some years the Department of the Senate has been assisting poor mothers until their children reach the age of three years and more recently has granted a premium of 200 francs per annum to such women as nurse their own babies. Almost half the illegitimate children of France are abandoned by their parents and tens of thousands of legitimate babies die through preventable causes. For this reason the Ministry of Health has opened one large maternity hospital and is providing funds for another. It is giving allowances for convalescent mothers and is doing much to safeguard babies against death and disease. France has some of the largest foundling asylums of the world. There is one in Paris which until now has been surpassed only by the great orphan asylum of Moscow. It has many thousand times more babies than were slaughtered by Herod at Bethlehem and it costs several million dollars a year to keep the little nobodies alive. The institution has been in existence for more than two centuries. It was once managed by the nuns but is now under the government. There is a little Moses basket, a sort of revolving tray set in one of the windows opening on the street on which a mother can lay her baby and by a whirl put it inside without herself being detected. The child is then taken as a member of the institution. It is given a name and if in any way the place of birth or the name of its father and mother can be obtained, these are put on a tag, a strip of parchment which is tied around the child's arm. The babies are kept in the refuge no longer than is absolutely necessary and then sent out to board or given away to those who will take them. Nurses who are in great demand have their railroad fares paid into Paris. There are always more babies than nurses and at one time every nurse was given a choice of six babies. Some of the babies are kept on one cow's milk and goats and even donkeys add to the feeding supply. Since the war, boy babies are the most popular and the orphan children of France have been more than ever carefully nourished. Private individuals are doing much to increase the baby supply. A notable instance is that of Monsieur and Madame Cognac, who some time ago gave a quarter of a million dollars to establish 90 awards for every large family among the poor, which has had at least nine children. All the children must be living or any who have died must have surrendered their lives for France. This man and his wife also gave another hundred thousand dollars to make 100 awards of one thousand dollars each to couples under 30 years of age who have as many as five children. I have heard of a landlord here in Paris who accepts as tenants only married couples with children and gives the mother of every baby born in his house the sum of two dollars, a chicken and a supply of coal for the winter. There is another patriot in the department of Haute Somme, who recently called the married men of his town together, promising each 20 francs for every child after the fourth. The mother had to bring out the children and show that all were her own. I'm told that more than 100 mothers came forward to claim the reward and that all together they had 816 children. There are a number of industrial corporations which are contributing to increase the birth rate. One has a fund that gives every married man among its employees an average of two francs a day for each child. An association of linen manufacturers is paying a supplementary wage of about two dollars a month to families having one child under 13 years of age and five dollars a month to families having two children. The extra wage goes on increasing until it reaches a maximum of four hundred and twenty dollars a year where there are seven children or more. Since I came to France I have occasionally bought some of the newspapers devoted to the increase of the baby crop. One of these entitled Marriage Lies Before Me. It is issued twice a month. Of the shape of the ordinary magazine it has 40 pages of which more than 20 are taken up with advertisements sent in by the subscribers. While their subscription lasts, those who subscribe have the right to advertise for wives or husbands to the extent of 15 words in each issue. If they wish to use more space they pay five cents for each additional word. The advertisements are numbered and all correspondence goes on through numbers and not by names, the magazine being the mailbox. Since the current numbers run from 32,000 to 91,000 I judge some business is done. To show what the advertisements are like I shall translate several chosen at random. Professor 28 has three adopted children would like to correspond with marriage in view with the person interested in pedagogy. Young nice girl, tall, brunette, serious, likes housework would marry a serious affectionate, hardworking man from 29 to 35. Colonel's widow without children 50 young in spirit earning 25,000 francs a year will have 100,000 would marry honorable man of position and fortune. The articles in the magazine many of which are by prominent writers relate to marriage in one form or another into the necessity of increasing the French population. End of chapter 14 Chapter 15 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Among the farmers the Rhone Valley where I am now has furnished the answer to my question in Paris. Where do the market men get the vast quantities of foodstuffs I saw in their stalls. The land here is covered with luxuriant crops. There are no fences and nature's great patchwork stretches out on every side as far as my eyes can reach. Just now we are driving past a wheat field in which blood red poppies as big around as a teacup look out of the green. On the other side of the road is a hayfield where women and girls are working side by side with the men. And farther on is a great expanse of wheat with women bent half double pulling the weeds. The women here work as hard as the men. They do all sorts of field labor and you see them scattered over every landscape. They are even more thrifty than the men and are the great savers of the French people. The French are economical farmers. With them a penny saved is two pence earned and they see that nothing goes to waste. They live as cheaply as any people of Europe. The average farmer starts out to work on black bread and vegetable soup or he may have only bread and cheese and a glass of wine. At noon he will have a vegetable soup and perhaps fried potatoes and in the evening the same. He has wine at every meal for it is one of the cheapest of drinks. Nearly everyone keeps a goat although but few drink the milk for goat's milk will make cheese. The work among the farmers goes on throughout the week and often on Sunday as well. The fields are full of Sunday workers while the church bells are ringing mechanics are plying their trades and the ordinary stores and workshops are open. There are two million more farm owners in this little republic than in our big one over the water. The average holding is less than six acres and thousands own little tracks upon which they live working a part of the year for someone else. The roads and streams and little canals of France are lined with poplars. I can see long lines of them cutting the landscape in every direction. Some of the trees are a hundred feet tall. They are bare branches with only a tassel left on the top. Others are full-limbed and some are just sprouting new growth on all sides. These poplars are grown for their branches and are finally cut down for wood or for furniture. The branches grow rapidly. They are cut off year after year put up into bundles and sold to the bakers to make the hot fires necessary for the crisp crust on the French bread. There is such a demand that raising them is a national industry. The poplars are planted in places which are good for nothing else and after five years each will annually yield an appreciable sum. Willows are grown in the same way and their sprouts are used for baskets. The French make money out of chestnuts. They grow varieties from two to three times as large as the American chestnut and sell them to the fruit stands and groceries. The nuts are used to dress turkeys, geese, chickens and game and also for desserts. The confectioners make candy of them and the best candy chestnuts bring high prices. There are large establishments in France which do nothing else. One at Lyon handles 25 million pounds of chestnuts a year. In southern France, Spain and Italy chestnuts are ground into a meal and used for bread. The French have one million acres devoted to gardens and fruits and in riding over the country one passes fields of hot beds and sees glass frames propped over plants outside the beds. In many places glass bells are used to cover the individual plants and there are some sections which raise potatoes under glass for export to London. The people have studied the soil and the sun and they coax as much work as possible from both. They feed the growing things and sometimes get three crops a year through intensive cultivation. Near Cherbourg, cabbage is raised early in February. After it is taken off, a crop of potatoes is planted and a third crop comes on in the autumn. This is on land that has been used for generations. And still we Americans talk of old mother earths being worn out. Nothing of the kind. The old lady has all the possibilities of perpetual youth. But coquette that she is, she must be petted and fed with the dainties she loves to make her yield her best crops. This is especially true of the vineyards which have been cultivated for centuries. The French vines are cut back every year and every vine has its own stake to grow on. One of the odd features of fruit growing here is the method of training the trees against stone walls, which when warmed by the sun act as radiators and make the fruit ripen earlier. I have seen garden after garden outside big French cities walled in this way. It is estimated that there are 400 miles of such walls in the suburbs of Paris and that they annually yield 12 million peaches. The peaches are sold singly and bring fancy prices. Indeed, I have seen peaches sell for $1 each but they were raised under glass. Suburban Paris has pear orchards that produce as much as $300 per acre. And there is one five acre orchard noted for its early pears which brings more than $2,000 a year. Every French country community has its clubs where the farmers meet and discuss how to market their crops. The farmers combine and buy their fertilizer at wholesale and appeal to the railroads for low freight rates. Not only the farmers but the railroad officials, the bankers and the merchants come to these club meetings. The railroad men are asked to advise the farmers as to what they should do about transportation and markets. And the bankers and merchants give their counsel about money matters. In America, the farmer usually has but little to do with the city man and seems to be jealous and afraid of him. The French farmer is willing to say there may be some brains outside his own class and he is glad to take advantage of them. Most of the farmers in France belong to agricultural syndicates of which there are all together several thousand. These syndicates are for the general furthering of the farming and commercial interests of the members. They are established under a national law and are organized into unions which work together for the interests of their class. They have a head office at Paris which negotiates with the railroads as to freight rates and also pushes agricultural interests before the French parliament. Among other thrifty organizations are the workmen's aid societies for them to give their members money in their old age. The members enter when young and at 55 expect to have enough saved to be able to retire and live on their pensions. The amount of pension is in proportion to the length and amount of saving and the members range all the way from 3 to 60 years old. Hundreds of school children belong to such associations and the government itself aids in their support. The societies are under the control of the Department of the Interior and the officials believe that they help to prevent strikes and divert the members from communistic and socialistic tendencies. These associations were created just after the French Revolution and are in a thriving condition today. It can be organized by any group of workmen or employees. Some of them are composed of clerks, some of sales girls and many of factory hands. The members are required to pay monthly dues and the money is invested in government bonds at 3% which interest goes on at a compound rate and accumulates the vast amounts which are given out as old age pensions. There are also accident societies and associations formed by the different railroad companies and other large corporations for their employees. It is wonderful how the money grows out of these small savings. Two cents a day laid aside for 16 years gives an income of about $2.50 a month from that time on and large sums produce money in the same proportion. Such societies can be formed in any community and deposits can be made wherever there is a post office. The smallest deposit is a franc but postage stamps are accepted and many poor people buy savings stamps and paste away a cent at a time until they can make up the deposit for a month. I have before me figures showing the savings of the French people during the first six months of the typical year. They amount to more than $1 billion. Of this more than half has gone to the purchase of shares and bonds which directly or indirectly will help in the rebuilding of France. A great part of it has been invested in short term treasury bonds at 4.5% interest. Deposits in the savings banks have increased and also the number of depositors. We have in the United States a little more than 11 million men women and children who have deposits in our savings banks. At the end of the war France had less than 8 million depositors but four years later she had more than 15,600,000. In other words the number of savings depositors had almost doubled. The depositors include all classes of people and persons of all ages. There are almost as many women as men among them. Many are farm hands and tens of thousands are employees in the mills and factories. There are thousands of school children who have savings accounts and they are encouraged by the teachers to open them. In every common school a child can deposit with his teacher amounts of one cent and upward and the agent of the postal savings banks comes around once a month and collects the sums. When the child makes his first deposit he gets a bank book and when his deposits have reached a franc a bigger one is supplied. Parents often lay aside money in these banks so that their children may have capital with which to begin life when they reach manhood or womanhood. Mothers lay aside money for their daughter's dowries and girls thus save for their wedding trusse. No wonder de Lesseps believed he could build a great canal from the woolen stockings of the French people and no wonder France has made such rapid recovery from the disasters of war. End of Chapter 15. Chapter 16 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. The City of Silk. I am in Lyon, the silk center of Europe, where for more than four centuries the finest stuffs for the bells of all nations have been turned out by the French. This city makes about one hundred and twenty million dollars worth of silks and silk goods every year, and its satins and velvets go all over the world. Lyon is situated in the rich valley of the Rhône, five hours south of Paris. It lies at the confluence of that river and this Sône. On the other side of the Sône are the heights of Fourvierre, with a great tower upon them up which we shall climb for the view. We walk through the town passing the sight of a palace in which the most cruel of the Roman emperors, Claudius and Caligula, were born. We go over one of the Sône bridges and take a cable railroad up the heights to the foot of the tower. Another elevator takes us to the top where we are three hundred feet above the river and high over the city. Behind us are the golden mountains of Lyon and beyond them across the valley filled with gardens and trees are the mighty Alps, their snowy peaks forming a ragged silver mass against the clouds. The day is clear and we can see the white cap of Mont Blanc a hundred miles away. Turn about now and look down into the valley. There is the Rhone fresh from its glacier cradle high in the Alps and nearer still flowing almost at our feet is the Sône winding about through the town side by side with its twin sister. Between the two is the greater part of Lyon and as we look we see the silvery streams girdling the municipal maiden in our silken clothes before they go winding on together to the sea. We are in the heart of one of the oldest parts of Europe and on the site of one of the most famous cities of France. This Rhone valley was a trade route in the days of Julius Caesar and in the Middle Ages great fairs were held here to which merchants from Amsterdam to Venice came to buy and sell. Six hundred years before Christ was born the Gauls had a town on this site and at the time Jesus lived there was a Roman city here. On this very hill one Roman emperor caused twenty thousand Christians to be massacred. While in the days of the French Revolution the tribunal finding that the guillotine would not kill the Lyon aristocrats fast enough tied them together with ropes in rows of sixty and mowed them down by wholesale with grapeshot. The Lyon of today however is a great manufacturing center with almost as many people as Pittsburgh. Standing here on the tower we can see the smokestacks of its car shops, tanneries and chemical works. And there across the valley on the other side is the famous Croix Rousse. The hill where the silk makers live where the shining costly patterns of generations have been woven and where some of the most beautiful fabrics of the world are produced. The hill looks but little like a manufacturing center. It has no vast brick buildings walled with windows such as one sees in the factory towns of our country. It has no smokestacks pouring volumes of black into the clouds and it looks more like a residential section than an industrial one. Still Lyon has hundreds of silk factories and most of them are situated upon that hill. Suppose we visit it. We descend to the zone, cross the bridge and take the trolley car through the city to the cable station at the foot of the Croix Rousse. Entering a boxcar where a score of silk workers are standing, in a moment we find ourselves riding to the top of the hill. A few steps from the station above take us into the heart of the silk industry of Lyon. We can tell it by the click, click, click which is heard on every street and in every hallway. The houses are lean five-story structures built along alley-like streets with narrow entrance doors. They look like tenement buildings and are indeed little more than great beehives filled with labors and every cell in them is a small factory. We enter one of the older buildings and walk up the narrow stone stairs. As we mount from story to story we hear the clicking going steadily on. The building is rudely constructed and without modern conveniences. We knock at a door pounding loudly to overcome the noise of the weaving. A shirt-sleeved Frenchman with a cap on his head opens the door and asks us to enter. He has just left his loom, but at our request he goes to work again. The loom is old-fashioned and he works it with his feet, throwing the shuttle from one side to the other through the threads by hand. He is making a pattern of dress goods which may eventually enhance the beauty of an American bell at a White House reception. Going on we enter room after room. Each has one or more looms with bare-armed and bare-headed men and women turning out all kinds of silk. Though the wages are four times what they were in pre-war days, we should consider them low. Some of the finest silk and velvet weaving in Lyon is done on the old-fashioned hand looms. Even where electrically run looms are used, much of the weaving is a house industry. Sometimes several weavers will club together in one room, each having his own loom and paying a low rate for the electric current. This is furnished so cheaply that a man gets what he wants at a few cents a day and pays for his loom and installments. Moreover, by this plan you can weave in the same room in which his father and his grandfather worked before him. I visited this afternoon the biggest silk mill in France. The workers are bare-armed, bare-headed girls, well-dressed and in many cases good-looking. They are the daughters of the men who work on the house looms and are the descendants of many generations of silk weavers. The mill is like a great cotton factory, save that much brighter colors are used. In the reeling room the threads are of all the hues of the rainbow and the thousands of spools make a maze of brilliant tints and shades. I was interested in the velvet works. The finest of such goods are made by home workers, although power looms are generally used. Much of the hand-woven velvet made in Lyon is brocaded in that in most beautiful patterns some of the silk and velvet curtains turned out bring as much as $800 a pair. I saw velvets today which sell for $70 a yard and was shown curtains which require four months to weave. The velvet is woven upon wires. When the weaving is finished the threads are cut through to the wires with a knife and the wires are taken out. As each line of looped threads must be cut separately a slip of the knife would ruin the cloth. I was shown specimens of furniture coverings made at a cost of $42 a yard. Think of paying $42 for a chair seat and this is what the stuff costs in France. The price will be doubled by the time it gets into one of the Fifth Avenue palaces and is fitted on its luxurious furniture. Every time one sits down upon it he will cover a yard of it. It would make me uncomfortable to sit down on $84 at one time. The royal families of Europe were the principal consumers of these expensive hand-woven materials and now that royalty is out of fashion the demand has greatly diminished. I have gone through some of the largest of the Lyon silk stores there to be found in buildings not unlike the factories. Entering by an unpretentious stairway to the second or third floor you first find a door with a little brass sign marked with the name of the merchant. You come into large rooms with long counters running through them. There is no silk on view where the goods are stored away in cases or drawers until brought out for the customers. The rooms are walled with mirrors in order that the colors may be shown by reflected as well as by direct light. Some of the oldest patterns are the most beautiful and these are repeated from generation to generation but new ones are continually being designed. The French are noted for their creative artistic ability and they have schools here at Lyon where designing is taught. Some of the factories make pictures in silk both for decoration and for wall covering. Lyon is doing all it can to foster its silk industry. It has its technical schools which teach all branches of silk manufacture. Young men come here from all parts of the world to study how to make silk and many work in the mills for that purpose. There is one school which charges from $160 to $280 a year for tuition. The lower sum is the charge for Frenchmen and the higher that for foreigners. In this school the best of modern silk weaving machinery is used and a great part of it bears the mark of American manufacturers. An American sewing machine stitches the pattern cards together and American methods of weaving are employed. All kinds of silks, velvets, and plain and figured goods are made here under the superintendents of the most skilled workmen. The boys do the work themselves with the professional silk men as overseers. I visited the Lyon Municipal Silk School on the Croix-Rousse upon the payment of a small sum any boy of Lyon who has reached the age of 15 can enter and learn all about silk weaving, designing, and pattern making. The course of day study is 10 months and there is in addition a night school in which a three-year course is offered. Every boy has to keep a diary of his work with the patterns of the silks he has made and copies of his designs. The school gives instruction in the breeding of silkworms as well as in all kinds of weaving and designing. The professor-in-charge, a kind-looking old Frenchman wearing a skull cap and rough clothes took me through one department after another. He introduced me to some of the students and had them work at the looms before my eyes. It was not until the 15th century that much silk weaving was done in France. Before that time the best of the silks came from Italy. Lyon, however, was even then a great fair city and many Italian silks were brought there for sale. Louis XI imported Italian weavers and about 40 years after the discovery of America, Francis I induced many of them to settle at Lyon by guaranteeing them exemption from taxation, free lodgings, and the right to carry swords, as well as immunity from imprisonment for debt. He brought silk weavers from Genoa, Florence, Lucca, and Venice and thus founded this business which has done much to make France rich. The industry prospered until the persecution of the Huguenots drove more than 300,000 of the most skillful of the French artisans out of the country and in a few years reduced the number of looms from 40,000 to 10,000. The Protestant weavers escaped to England, Germany, and Switzerland and started the silk manufacture of those countries. Silk is no longer the dress of the rich and fashionable exclusively. A greater proportion of the people of the United States wear silk than do those of any other country. And year by year the demand for it grows steadily all over the world. In other countries and especially in the United States every effort has been made to obtain more efficient quantity production at lower cost. But at Lyon the mills have been slow to adopt the improved methods. During and immediately after the World War when German competition hardly existed the French failed to make the most of their opportunity to capture new markets. The manufacturers are intensely individualistic and disliked to combine. They seem each to prefer to keep up their own standards of high quality rather than get together to turn out cheaper grades in quantity production. The beautiful silk from the German mills at Krefeld and the fine silks of Milan in Italy have won away some of the old customers of Lyon. The Italians are rapidly regaining the place they held in the Middle Ages among the chief silk manufacturing peoples of the world. It used to be that most of the raw silk brought from China came to Marseille. A large part of it now goes to Genoa and other Italian ports. And the output of Italian silk goods has grown so rapidly that Milan is already second only to Lyon as the silk center of Europe and bids fair to outstrip the French metropolis. The United States is now the leading silk making country of the world. In the last few years the value of the silk produced in our mills has increased by nearly 200%. At one time we annually contributed about 30 million dollars to the Lyon silk weavers. Now we make almost all the silk we consume besides exporting millions of dollars worth annually. The French claim that the falling off in their trade is due to our protective tariff which is built up the silk industry of Patterson and other American cities. In these places the silk is made in large mills and the cost is so reduced by up-to-date labor saving machinery and by proper organization that American commercial travelers can now sell American silks in Europe. Some of the French manufacturers have already removed their plants to the United States and others have remodeled their mills on the American plan. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. No sluggers need apply. Just the voice of the sluggard I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon. I must slumber again. I walked by his garden and saw the wild briar. The thorn and the thistle grew broader and higher. If the ghost of Isaac Watts could be with me in Belgium today he would quickly agree that the lines of his poem, The Sluggard, which I have quoted, do not apply to this kingdom. Indeed, I am amazed at the thrift I see all around me and wish that more of my countrymen would adopt the state gospel that seems the rule here. At the close of the World War, Belgium was in a situation quite different from that of France, England or the United States. The industrial machinery in both of the last two countries, as well as what was left of that in France, was in full swing. It had been speeded up by the war and the foreign markets were open. Belgium, owing to the German occupation, had lost all its markets. The war had taken a large part of its workers. Some had been killed, some deported by the Germans and many educated to idleness by the doles of their own government and the charities from the United States and other parts of the world. Before the war, Belgium had depended largely on German capital to finance her industries. After the armistice, the little kingdom awoke to find herself out of money short of men and with most of her industrial equipment either destroyed or carried away. What did she do? Did she play the part of the sluggard? No. She rolled up her sleeves, took her spade and hoe in hand, bent her back, dug her bare toes into the rich alluvial soil under her feet and went to work. She borrowed money from her own people at home and got more from abroad on the security of the peace treaty provision that Germany should pay Belgium's damages in advance of those due France and the rest of the Allies. She instituted new taxes and surtaxes and a year after the war was over found that her national revenues were $20 million more than had been estimated. Meanwhile, she had got back the bulk of her workers and had stopped the drift toward pauperism that charity had started. She raised wages, put her laborers to work on the highways and railroads, organized a combination of 300 cooperative building societies and sent men to scour Germany and bring back the machinery that had been taken away. Nearly 8,000 tons of stolen material and 90,000 tons of machinery were recovered from Germany. Today, the industries of Belgium have been practically restored and the country is on its feet. But first, let me say a few words of the Belgians. They are about the busiest of all the peoples on earth. They have here a country one-fourteenth the size of California, but so thickly populated that if California could have the same number for every square mile, it would contain more people than we have in the Union. If the main body of the United States were as thickly settled as Belgium, it would have 200 million more people than are in the world today. The population here is 658 per square mile or more than twice the density of the population of Germany and just twice that of Great Britain and Ireland. The only country that approaches Belgium in density is Holland, which has 122 fewer people for every 640 acres inside its boundaries. Most of the Belgians live in villages and work on the land. There are only four cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. With its suburbs, Brussels, the largest and finest, is almost as big as St. Louis. Antwerp is the size of Cincinnati and Ghent and Lige have each about the same population as Memphis. Malines has 60,000, Bruges is a bit smaller, and Ostend and Louvain are smaller still. In comparison with most of humanity, these people, so crowded together, are rich. Before the war, they put in their savings bank every year several hundred million dollars. Today, more than half of the school children have their own bank books and the deposits of the primary students amount to upward of five dollars each. The people are well clad, and however lean they may have been during the war, they look well fed now. These Belgian farms yield twice as much grain to the acres hours. There are patches which produce two tons of tobacco or 800 bushels of carrots per acre. I am told that prior to 1914, a farmer was able to support himself, his wife and three children on less than three acres, and any surplus of land brought in clear profit. Belgium also has coal and iron. Before the war, it was selling iron and steel to all parts of the world, and its production of pig iron was half that of France. Lige was not hurt in the first military attack, but later the Germans shipped off to Germany, first the copper, then the machine tools, and finally the full equipment of whole plants and factories, whose owners and operators refused to work them for the enemy. Before the war, Belgium had 54 blast furnaces, and at its close only four remained intact. Yet a good part of them are now again in operation, and through a combination in the steel industry, the country is prepared for a greater export trade than ever before. Belgium is making steel rails for Great Britain, China, South America, and the Dutch East Indies, at prices much lower than those of competing mills in England. I've traveled all over the world, but I've never been able to get out of sight of Belgian goods, nor to find a country where Belgium did not have a part of its trade. Belgium has a great textile industry, which, before the Germans overran her, made goods for export to the amount of almost 80 million dollars per annum. It had a big-flax industry, including 25 factories making linen thread, or toe. The linen spindles numbered 375,000, and the cotton spindles more than one million and a half. These industries were much injured during the war, but both have made a rapid recovery. A great deal more flax has been planted on account of the loss of the Russian product, and the acreage has steadily increased. The woolen mills of Belgium were famous during the Middle Ages, and before the war the country had 110 weaving mills, from which the Germans took a great part of the machinery. Much of this was brought back in the industry as now handling more wool than ever. There are certain streams along which the mills are located, whose waters give the Belgian wool a peculiar brilliancy and softness not found elsewhere on the continent. Before the Germans invaded Belgium, she was exporting glass of all kinds to nearly every part of the world. Liege was making more than 60 million pounds of table glass per annum, and it had one factory that produced on the average a quarter of a million pieces of glass every day. This factory began working again on the day of the armistice, and the industry as a whole has since practically equalled its former production. In plate glass, especially, Belgium was far ahead of the other countries of Europe. Most of its output went to England, Holland, and the United States. Not only has all this business been recovered, but the present exports exceed those anti-dating the German invasion. There are but a few straws which show how the winds of prosperity are blowing in Belgium. Nearly every industry is improving its plants, and there are combinations of capital and movements to develop foreign trade, which make the outlook better than ever. There is one other factor in the comeback of Belgium, which deserves mention here. That is the Belgian dog. He is a live institution and must be, I am sure, responsible for the expression to work like a dog. The dogs are worked harder than any other animals. I see them hauling vegetable carts, pulling between shafts or hitch to the axle. Sometimes they toil along side by side with a woman, and sometimes they do all the pulling themselves. Every man who runs a push cart has a dog to help him, and the milk cart is always drawn by one or more dogs. It is wonderful what the dogs pull and how well they work. I tested one at a dog market in Brussels. The owner wanted to sell him, and upon my asking a trial, he loaded fifteen hundred pounds upon the wagon, and the dog dragged it along the cobbled streets without over exertion. He said it could pull a ton. The Belgian dogs are usually in good condition. They are so valuable that they are often fed while their owners go hungry. End of Chapter 17 Chapter 18 of From France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Automobiling through Belgium Step into my car and take a look at this little land as we spin over the roads. The highways are often stone paved. We can make thirty miles every hour and easily cover two hundred a day. Belgium is not much longer than from Baltimore to New York, and not much wider than the distance between Philadelphia and Baltimore. It has an area about one fourth that of Pennsylvania. It is less than one third the size of Indiana and only a little larger than Massachusetts, with Delaware added there too. For the most part the land is flat, although the Ardenne Mountains at the southeast rise in places to the height of the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Belgium, like Holland, is made up largely of the rich earth washings brought down by rivers and streams from the Highlands, and it is cut up by canals. We cross the canal every few miles. These necessitate bridges, which in most cases are of stone or concrete. There are more than a thousand miles of canals and five rivers that are used as commercial waterways. The Shelt, which would not be considered a large stream in the United States, has on its banks three cities, Antwerp, Ghent, and Tournai. It has been a water highway for centuries, and boats were paying toll upon it as far back as 1000 A.D. The freight now carried by water runs annually into the hundreds of millions of tons, and in some years to more than one billion. There are five ship canals having a combined length 16 miles greater than that of our big ditch at Panama. The country is one vast truck garden cut into small fields, now covered with the richest of crops. There are no fences, and the grass, grain, and vegetables extend on and on with green trees lining the roads as far as our eyes can reach. The crops are even heavier than those we saw in France. The shocks in the weed fields are so thick that they stand out like soldiers dressed in the yellow uniform of Belgium. In places they have been carried to the sides of the fields so as not to interfere with the plowing, which often results here in two crops a year. See how well kept everything is? There are no weeds anywhere. There are no tools lying about, and the grain is protected in shock and in stack. Those oat shocks on our right are each made up of eight sheaves with cap sheaves on top. The cap is so made that it looks almost like thatch and is tied on with straw ropes. The wheat shocks on our left are capped in the same way. The sheaves are small and the straw is long. Each sheaf is as big around as a three-gallon bucket, and when I lean one against my knees, it reaches as high as my waist. The grain is exceedingly heavy, for the production per acre of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and potatoes exceeds that of any other civilized country. The wheat yield is 37 bushels per acre, while our average is only 14. Before the war, Belgium imported about three-fourths of her wheat, but her production of other foodstuffs, including meat, was sufficient for the whole population. And she exported beet sugar, potatoes, draft horses, fruit, and vegetables. She now produces more than half a billion pounds of beet sugar a year. We see also flax, another great crop of Belgium whose linen industry is famous the world over. The flax is cut with sickles, and the little stalks, not much bigger than knitting needles, are propped up against each other so that they look like so many yellow dunce caps. After drying, they are put up in double-storey sheaves, all carefully capped like the wheat and oats, and later carried in huge carts to the mills near the streams in which the flax must be rotted to get out the fiber. Besides manufacturing quantities of linen, Belgium exports more than $10 million worth of flax in one year. As we go on, we pass fields of potatoes, which are growing 300 bushels per acre, patches of barley which yield 50 bushels, and great quantities of green hops trained on tall poles. This is a land of good beer, which now costs about ten cents a pint. It is greedily drunk, for so far prohibition has not corked up the thirsty Belgian throat. Our automobile has stopped at the side of the road to allow a caravan of teams dragging huge wagons of wheat to pass by. Each wagon holds from three to five tons, but two horses pull it with ease over these smooth Belgian blocks. Some teams haul two loaded wagons, the tongue of the second tied to the rear of the first. The wagons themselves weigh half a ton, and some are so heavily loaded that an American team could not budge them on one of the rough country roads of the states. The horses are enormous. They look like elephants in horse hide, and some of the best will weigh a ton each. I have seen even bigger horses pulling drays in the cities and ports where they still compete with the motor trucks. Draft stallions to the value of millions of dollars a year are imported. Oxen also are used, and even cows, donkeys and some American mules. There are but few tractors, although they are gradually coming into those parts of the country where the soil is heavy and on farms of 100 acres or more. They are employed chiefly in deep plowing. One of the surprising features of our travel through Belgium is the multitude of small farms. Out of less than seven and a half million acres of total area, about five million acres are tilled. Much of the ground is worked with the hoe and the spade, and no less than one-sixth of the people are classified as agricultural laborers. Out of every 100 persons employed on the farms, only 16 are paid wages. The others are proprietors or members of the farm families. Most of the farmers live in villages of one or two-story brick houses whence they go out to work their small patches of land. As to the size of the holdings, the average tract is only four acres, whereas in other countries it is from 30 to 100 acres. As time goes on, these farms will grow smaller and smaller, unless there is a change in the inheritance laws. I have discussed this subject with one of the leading real estate lawyers of Brussels. He tells me that a man must leave one-fourth of his property to his wife and that the rest must be divided equitably among his children. He may will away as he pleases only a fixed portion. The result is that farmlands are being continually re-divided, but this does not matter so much with the people accustomed to till every inch of their soil and make it produce. As we go on in our automobile, we are surprised at the scarcity of motor transportation in Europe. The United States has a car or truck of some kind for every two families. France has only one for every 40, and Belgium has even fewer. Most of the cars here are of lightweight and low horsepower. For the upkeep far exceeds that of our cars at home. In France, gasoline sells four from 60 to 75 cents a gallon. On our motor trips there, we sometimes filled our car from square cans as long as a stick of stove wood, each holding a little more than a gallon. It took ten of these cans to fill our tank and the man or woman who sold them brought them out to the car and poured them in one by one. Sometimes we found gasoline pumps like those used in the States, most of which were imported from America. Gasoline is called Essence in France, the name coming from the essence of petroleum, which is just what it is. Many of the French cars are so small that if you put one in the tonneau of an American 7-passenger machine, it would rattle around. In some of the smaller cars, the body hangs down to within 8 or 10 inches of the roadway and the car runs on only 2 or 3 horsepower. The most popular of the cheap machines has from 5 to 10 horsepower and the largest and best seldom have more than 30 or 40. The speed of the motor cars of France is beyond conception and the recklessness of drivers amazing. There are plenty of traffic rules, but no one observes them and the brass button traffic policeman with his white club seems not such a czar as he is with us. Unless he causes an accident, no one is punished for fast driving. Even the person who has run over, if he is so fortunate as to escape death, is arrested for obstructing the traffic. Here the bicycle takes the place of our fliver and Belgium has more than one for every two families. The number is 900,000. They are used by men, women and children, by the rich and the poor, for work and for pleasure. They are the chief picnic vehicle and the boys and girls riding tandem bring youth to my eyes. They make me think of the popular song of our own bicycle craze. It won't be a stylish marriage, we can't afford a carriage, but you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 of From France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. From Lige to Ypres. For the last few days I have been motoring in my Benz limousine from town to town and from battlefield to battlefield, making notes of the rebuilding that has been going on here since the war. It began the moment the gun ceased firing and it so transformed the country that some of the tourist organizations have stopped taking their parties through the different salience because the signs of devastation have almost passed away. You all know how roughly Belgium was dealt with during the World War. She incurred the anger of the Germans by holding back their armies when they were preparing to pounce down upon Paris. In July 1914 they had one million men massed on the western frontier and on August 4th they invaded the country. On August 5th they bombarded the forts of Lige with the biggest guns ever known up to that time and within a week three of these forts had surrendered. Meanwhile the British had waked up and were pouring in soldiers. The French had concentrated along their frontier and the five German armies were so delayed by little Belgium that Paris was saved and the war eventually won for the Allies. After entering Belgium the German forces divided. Some came on and occupied Brussels and then smithered their way to Malin and Louvain to begin the short siege of Antwerp. Another force successfully bombarded Namur in the valley of the Mous and on the 22nd of August came the Great Battle of Mons where the British with much inferior forces engaged 300,000 Germans and were gradually driven back step by step until they reached the Marne but that is a part of the story of France. After the Battle of Mons most of Belgium was evacuated by the British and the French. Brussels had been taken over by the Germans two days before. Malin had been destroyed by big guns. The Cathedral of Louvain had been battered and its library of valuable manuscripts and 300,000 volumes had been burned. The Kaiser's troops were besieging Antwerp which was held by the Belgians under King Albert. During the bombardment of Malin and Louvain hundreds of business buildings and private dwellings were reduced to dust. A light fate came upon several hundred structures in Antwerp itself. During my travels I visited each of these cities most of the buildings have been restored and in some cases much better ones have been put up. The new private buildings are artistic many of them are of white stone and some have their walls decorated with carvings all are in harmony with the old surroundings. Louvain's new million-dollar library built by the funds raised by 640 colleges and universities in the United States is not on the site of the old one but faces the Place de Peuple which is filled with old forest trees. The design is by Whitney Warren an American architect who planned it to harmonize with the typical architecture of Belgium. The inscription selected to run across the front in great sunken letters reads Fiorore Tutanica De Ruta Dona Americano Restituta which means destroyed by Tutanic fury restored by America's gift. The building covers a full square of ground on the highest land in the city. On my way to Antwerp I saw the place upon which were mounted the guns which sent shells as tall as I am a distance of 10 miles into that city. The site I am told had been fixed by the Germans before the war. The guns were set up on the foundation of a wooden villa which covered a bed of reinforced concrete of great thickness. The villa was taken away in these huge 17 inch guns whose enormous size astounded the world were placed here. The bombardment lasted 36 hours and during a part of this time a shell was dropped every minute. A gun could fire only a limited number of shells before it had to be allowed to cool. The damage done to Antwerp was small for the Germans expected to maintain the port as one of their great war stations of the future and to use it as Napoleon did when he said Antwerp is a loaded pistol that I hold against England's throat. Fortunately for the world the famous cathedral was unharmed. In all only 700 buildings were destroyed and some of them were so dilapidated anyhow that the city was glad to have them removed. On October 9th when Antwerp was surrendered by the mayor the Belgians and the British had left the city and fallen back upon Ghent from which they retired two days later. The Germans went on to take Ghent and Bruges and within less than a week had reached Ostin at which time the Belgian army was on the river Iser. You may remember the great battle of Iser which lasted 10 days and was fought upon the land, upon the sea, and in the air. That was the first battle in which aviators were successfully employed and it was the one in which the Belgians shot holes in the raised banks of the river so that its waters increased by the inflowing tide spread over the country and inflicted severe losses upon their enemies. It was about the same time that the battle of Ypres or as the British Tommies called it, Wipers, began. The first shell descended on that town on October 7th and two days later 20,000 Germans passed through it. Six days after that the first British soldiers came in and on October 19th the British met the Germans in a contest that lasted three weeks and resulted in the Germans losing a quarter of a million men and the allies more than 100,000. Another battle took place there in 1915 and a third in 1917 when the British advanced and pushed back the Germans. In each of these battles there was fighting throughout the surrounding country which wiped out towns and villages and caused about the worst destruction that Belgium suffered during the war. To understand the devastation one must recall Ypres of the past. More than two centuries before America was discovered the city had 200,000 inhabitants and was one of the richest industrial towns of the world. Its people wove woolen cloth, silks and velvets and, accepting the cathedrals, the cloth hall of Ypres today was the finest building of the Middle Ages. It was used by the draper's guild as its warehouse and exchange. Another great structure was the cathedral built about the same time and connected with the cloth hall was the new work. It began the same year that the Mayflower came to anchor near Plymouth Rock. All of these buildings and others were rich in carvings, paintings, stained glass windows and valuable archives. The city itself reduced to less than one tenth of its former size was a beautiful relic of artistic antiquity proud of its history but famous chiefly for its produce market in which on Saturdays more than 40,000 pounds of butter changed hands. At the close of the war the city was deader than Sodom after Lot and his two loving daughters ran off to Zor. The cloth hall and the cathedral were masses of ruins. The houses had vanished and the town was a shell-swept graveyard. There are now 400 cemeteries scattered over the salient and they contain 250,000 graves. The other day I rode by the cemetery of Poel Capel where are buried 4,000 bodies found in shell holes. On 3,000 of the crosses above them are printed the words in memory of an unknown British soldier. Immediately after the armistice the work of reconstructing Ypres was commenced. The first thing was to create a bright spot in the wilderness. This was done by clearing the public square and filling it with flowers, shrubs and grass and planting two rows of trees along the boulevard Malon which leads from it. At the same time the people came back more than 12,000 wooden structures of different types from single room sheds to temporary town halls sprang up overnight. Meantime brick and other materials became available and the construction of substantial houses commenced. During the war something like 4,000 houses in Ypres were destroyed. Most of these have now been rebuilt. Yet our hearts burn as we pass the ruined cathedral and the aisle with their acres of still falling walls. Parts of them are surrounded by scaffolding and the masons are trying to make restorations but it seems impossible that they can succeed. The ruins look like those of Tim God or Pompey and in places no better than the remains of old Carthage which was wiped again and again from the face of the earth. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This labor box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Snapshots in Flanders. We have left Ypres and are riding about over the country through villages which at the time of the armistice were in ruins. The landscape is spotted with patches of red. Each patch the tiled roof of a new farmhouse or a new village. Every old house has a new roof and on some of them I see the figures of the year of rebuilding painted or worked in with other tiles of black or blue. Red in China is the sign of good luck. Here in Belgium it is the sign of reconstruction and it means that prosperity has come back to the people. Most of the houses are brick or stone. Nearly all have but one story with ridged roofs ending close to the walls. It is only in the larger towns that one can see two and three-story buildings. The evidences of the devastation of war have practically disappeared. The railroads have been reconstructed, roadways rebuilt and improved and transportation facilities generally are perhaps better than ever before. Belgium was the first country in continental Europe to build a railway. That was in 1834 and ever since then she has been noted for her excellent railway construction. The Germans took over a total of trackage as long as the distance between New York and San Francisco or more railroads to the square mile that exist in any other country on earth. In addition there were narrow gauge lines which formed a network covering the kingdom. There were 2,400 miles of them running from village to village and acting as feeders to the standard gauge railroads. Of all this the invaders completely destroyed more than 700 miles and damaged so much more that altogether over 1,200 miles were put out of operation. They destroyed in the neighborhood of 1,500 bridges and when they retreated the country had less than 300 locomotives and only 3,000 cars in good working order. After the armistice orders were placed in America and Great Britain for new rolling stock, the ones promptly delivered were those from America. Gradually the roads have come back and although they are operating at greatly increased fares and at a loss to the government the service in many respects is equal to any we have at home. This is true also in France. In my railway rides there I frequently had express trains which made more than 60 miles an hour. I went over an excellent roadbed from Paris to Rass a distance of 100 miles in 2 hours and made the 188 miles between Lille and Paris in 4 hours worth a rate of 47 miles per hour including 3 stops. Our best trains from New York to Washington make the 227 miles in 5 hours which is only a little more than 45 miles per hour. The French train was brand new. The first class cars were exceedingly comfortable and the fare was only about 2.5 cents a mile. The trip cost me $4.28 whereas if I remember correctly the fare from Washington to New York on the Congressional Limited is a little over $10 or more than twice as much although the distance is only 35 miles greater. My dinner in the French dining car cost 85 cents and was better than the meals on our trains at home. Everything was served piping hot. We began with an excellent soup served in large cups after which came fish with potatoes followed by a course of roast beef with green beans. The meal ended with a dessert of cheese and ripe grapes. We were charged 10 cents extra for coffee and I could have had a bottle of excellent wine for 25 cents. The dining car prices are about the same here in Belgium. In both France and Belgium there is much discussion of electrification of the railways. The French scheme is associated with the harnessing of the water power of the Rhône River an excellent report upon which has been made by Dr. William C. Huntington former commercial attaché to the American Embassy in Paris. He says that the Rhône basin is theoretically capable of producing 1,700,000 horsepower and that it could actually give 800,000 horsepower all the year round which is equal to the importation of 5 million tons of coal per annum. France has a program to electrify more than 5,000 miles of railway covering a large part of the most important French systems. The total expense is estimated at more than 2.5 billion francs. Belgium proposes to begin electrification with the Brussels Antwerp line and to go on from there to the Luxembourg line. It will have both self-propelling trains and trains drawn by electric tractors. The speed made will be 45 or 50 miles per hour. But Jules has stopped our automobile at Lungenboom, a little village near Moore and motions to us to get out. We do so and follow him to a turnstile whereby, paying a franc, we enter a wood and follow a trail to Longmax of Moore, a little brother of the Big Bertha that sent shells 75 miles into Paris. This German gun was used to fire upon Dunkirk on the English Channel, 28 miles away. It is 14 inches in diameter and its barrel is so large that when I offered a boy of 12 inches to call in that I might photograph him looking out he had no trouble in doing so. The barrel is 42 inches in circumference and its long shell was, I venture, much taller than the boy. Longmax is mounted on a great concrete foundation with a sunken pit walled with iron beneath it. He can be raised and lowered and swung around as though on a pivot. Close by was a dummy gun which was used with a smoke and flash apparatus to draw the British fire. In a dugout probably used for storing ammunition I found a Belgian selling lace. He had beautiful tablecloths at a low price and lace collars of fine work which cost only two or three dollars. He brought out the pillow on which he himself had made much of his stock telling us that the finest of his wares had required weeks of work. Returning to our automobile we go past windmills, tall white towers of brick or wood showing their red arms about. They make me think of Don Quixote and his fight with the windmill. He succeeded almost as well as the Germans. The windmills here are used to grind grain and are operated from the farmsteads nearby. See that stack of stumps and logs near those houses of bright yellow bricks? They came from trees along the roadside cut off by the shells. We ride on between rows of young trees newly planted. During their occupation of Belgium the Germans cut down timber worth several hundred millions of dollars. They cut old and young trees and in some places even the orchards were ruined. In Ainot, Liège and Namur large wooded areas were entirely destroyed. Riding on to the northeast we go through the ancient city of Bruges. It once vied with Ypres having 150,000 inhabitants although now it is not more than one-third of that size. The city of Canals. It is nearly surrounded by them and the waterways run through the town. A new ship canal six miles long connecting it with Zee Bruges was opened some years ago. You will remember that the latter port on the North Sea was a German submarine base during the war. It was badly damaged by the bombardment of the Allied airmen and the Germans sank large cranes in the docks as well as 12 ships and other small craft in the basin. In order to clear the harbor the canal was blocked and the water pumped out. Another great canal city is Ghent through which we pass on our ride back to Brussels. It is cut up by waterways which divided into 13 islands connected by 58 bridges. This is a quaint old Flemish town whose medieval buildings, great cathedral and belfry and many museums are the delight of the tourist. About the time of Columbus it was the most important city in Flanders and again it has on its seven league boots and is rapidly growing. With its suburbs its population is now in excess of 200,000 and it is more than 16 miles in circumference. A wide ship canal deep enough for all ocean going merchant vessels connects the town with the shelt. Ghent stands next to Antwerp as the chief port of Belgium. It is noted for its imports of cotton which comes from the United States by the tens of thousands of tons and it has great cotton and linen mills which have more than 1500,000 spindles and about 50,000 looms. It is the Manchester of Belgium and its people have always been noted as spinners and weavers. Besides its cotton manufacturers it has one of the largest linen mills of the world while in the country nearby fine lace is made much of it by women working by hand. End of Chapter 20 Chapter 21 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter The Sleeper Vox recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B. A visit to the coal pits I am at Wasmes in the heart of one of the richest coal mining regions of Europe Belgium's deposits of coal and iron make it hot pipe and with its many iron and steel mills it is one of the busiest workshops of the continent. Its annual production of coal amounts to more than 20 million tons. It uses the greater part of this at home and also imports fuel from Germany and England. Only one of the mines was destroyed by the Germans during the war. The mining conditions of Belgium are entirely different from those of our country. Most of our mines are near the surface and it costs but little to get the coal to the cars. Those of Belgium are far down under the earth and every ton has to be lifted out by machinery. Some of the mines which I visited today are more than half a mile deep. The water has to be fought at every turn and mighty pumps are employed to keep the works dry. There are tunnels cutting the earth this way and that at a depth of 2,000 feet. Over them are other tunnels and the whole region has been turned into catacombs and deep delving after the black diamonds. The mines have to be timbered. The wood is cut from the forests nearby but most of it is not over 6 inches thick and as it comes to the mines it looks like telegraph poles each 50 feet long and tapering to a point at the end. Such timber stands in great stacks about each mine. Much of it is unloaded from the cars by women who handle the poles like so many Amazons. The work in our coal mines is done altogether by men. Here much of the labor above the surface is performed by women and such women lusty young girls are from 16 to 20. Pretty girls, rosy cheeked, round armed and plump their faces smutted but at the same time comely. Their eyes are bright and their beauty is accentuated by the coal dust on their faces through which the red shows like that of the dark moss rose. This coal region looks far different from those of Pennsylvania, Ohio or Tennessee. There it is mountainous. Here at Wasmes the land is flat and the only elevations are made by the dumps of the mines. The coal is filled with waste. It has to be sorted and the refuse is carried out upon cars. There is so much of it that a pyramidal mountain soon rises up beside each mine standing out like a black cone against the blue sky. There are such pyramids everywhere in this part of Belgium. Some of them are dead, the mines which produced them having been worked out and abandoned. Others have ladders up their backs and a framework on the top where women push the cars along and with a rattling sound empty them. Some of the pyramids are smoking. There is much sulfur in the coal and spontaneous combustion often starts a fire which burns on for years. Instances are known of people going to sleep on the dumps and being suffocated by the fumes and gases. Take your stand with me on one of these coal mountains just outside Wasmes and look about you. See the farms covered with rich crops with these coal mounds rising above them. There is one at our right with great bug-like bags crawling over it. Take my field glass and look at them. They are not bags. There are two women who are picking up the coal that has been left in the waste. There comes a car along the coal mountain. Two women are pushing it and with the glass you can almost see the muscles in their bare arms swell as they cast it on the dump. Now look at that mound at the left. It is hundreds of feet high and like the others about it it is an evidence of the enormous waste that the miners have to deal with. They have been picked over and the amount of waste is evidently greater than the quantity of the coal itself. Let us visit one of the mines. At the mouth of the opening stand a half-dozen Belgian girls. Their heads done up in blue and white handkerchief turbines. Their sleeves rolled up high above the elbows and their shapely ankles plainly showing above their white wooden clogs. See them grasp that car as the engine stops and shove it over the rails where it is to be dumped for the sorters. As they do so a second gang of girls takes their places to handle the next car and others shoot the empties back to the farther side of the shaft. There is no fooling about this. The women work like bees and with the strength of horses. They do as much as the men and they are, I am told, more conscientious in their work. Leaving the shaft we go to the sorters. The coal rolls down a chute into the cars. The women stand at the side of the chute and help it onward with hoes. Girls sit farther down picking the refuse and slate out of the coal with their hands. Still farther on there are more turban bare-armed maidens sooty and dirty and in the railroad car into which the coal drops. There are other women hoeing the coal this way and that sorting out waste. Girls and women work as fast as fingers and arms can move for they are paid on a piece-work basis. The women miners of Belgium are far better off today than they have ever been in the past. Their condition has been notoriously bad. For a long time little children were employed in the mines. They were harnessed to carts and coal cars with straps and chains so that they crawled along in their hands and knees dragging the coal to the mouth of the shaft. Women over 21 used to be permitted to work underground for a 12 hour day but this has now been forbidden by law. The work was hard and degrading. In unsexed the women and in time broke them down like so many draft animals. Indeed in old age they became little better than the horses and donkeys with which they worked in the darkness of the underground tunnels. The girls I saw at work on the surface were not bent and broken but quite as well developed physically as the athletic young women of the United States. And still they were toiling like so many horses pushing the cars this way and that. Some were lifting great lumps of coal weighing from 15 to 20 pounds each and others were doing all sorts of work which in America would be done by men. In one place a ditch was being dug and lined with brick and cement. A girl was mixing the mortar with a hoe and a little farther on at a brick pile three sturdy girls were loading bricks upon a wheelbarrow which a fourth girl pushed on to the car when it was full. They were working hard and the perspiration stood out in white beads on their dusty faces. I took a photograph of them and my heart came into my throat as they smiled. I have been interested in the life of the people. Every great mind has its dwellings about it a collection of little two-story brick houses built together in blocks. Each house has five rooms two on the ground floor, two above and a little attic under the roof. The families are large and the average number of children is six or seven. The miners are miserably poor for they spend much of their wages for drink. I am surprised at the number of saloons. They are known as esthaminé and one sees them everywhere. There is hardly a block in the city without one or more along the country roads. Many of the workmen get drunk on Saturday and lay off over Monday. End of section 21