facts readily obtainable, this Supreme Justice reviews all the objections raised on either side and without a motion from anyone passes on the decision of the inferior court.  On the other hand, the lower courts are open to an immediate settlement of disputes between the wage earners, and newsboys and fishermen are almost daily seen going to the judge for a decision regarding a dispute over five or ten cents.  When the judge has cross-questioned both sides, without the presence of attorneys, or the necessity of serving a process, or raising a dollar and a quarter, as here, the poorest of the poor have their wrongs righted.  It is said that not one decision out of one hundred is appealed, thus calling for the existence of an attorney.

To all other institutions organized in the interest of the wage earner has been added the national savings bank system, that makes loans to men of small means, that enables the farmer and the working man to buy a little garden and build a house, while at the same time insuring the working man against accident and sickness.  Belgium is a poor man’s country, it has been said, because institutions have been administered in the interest of the men of small affairs.

THE GREAT BELGIUM PLAIN IN HISTORY

But the institutions of Belgium and the industrial prosperity of her people alone are not equal to the explanation of her unique heroism.  Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Caesar said that Gaul was inhabited by three tribes, the Belgae, the Aquitani, the Celts, “of whom the Belgae were the bravest.”  History will show that Belgians have courage as their native right, for only the brave could have survived.  The southeastern part of Belgium is a series of rock plains, and if these plains have been her good fortune in times of peace, they have furnished the battlefields of Western Europe for two thousand years.  Northern France and Western Germany are rough, jagged and wooded, but the Belgian plains were ideal battlefields.  For this reason the generals of Germany and of France have usually met and struggled for the mastery on these wide Belgian plains.  On one of these grounds Julius Caesar won the first battle that is recorded.  Then came King Clovis and the French, with their campaigns; toward these plains also the Saracens were hurrying when assaulted by Charles Martel.  On the Belgian plains the Dutch burghers and the Spanish armies, led by Bloody Alva, fought out their battle.  Hither, too, came Napoleon, and the great mound of Waterloo is the monument to the Duke of Wellington’s victory.  It was to the Belgian plains, also, that the German general, last August, rushed his troops.  Every college and every city searches for some level spot of land where the contest between opposing teams may be held, and for more than two thousand years the Belgian plain has been the scene of the great battles between the warring nations of Western Europe.