[35] See Les Paysans et le Socialisme, a speech delivered by Compère-Morel, in the Chamber of Deputies, December 6, 1909. Also published in pamphlet form by the Socialist Party.
CHAPTER VI
THE BELGIAN LABOR PARTY[ToC]
I
In Belgium the physical, political, and economic environment is suited to a symmetrical development of Socialism. It is a small country, "at the meeting-point of the three great European civilizations," Vandervelde, the leader of the Belgian Socialists, has pointed out. And his boast is true that the Belgian Socialists have absorbed the leading characteristics of the social movement in each of these countries. "From England Belgian Socialists have learned self-help, and have copied their free and independent organizations, principally in the form of co-operative societies. From Germany they have adopted the political tactics and the fundamental doctrines which were expressed for the first time in the 'Communist Manifesto.' From France they have taken their idealistic tendencies, and the integral conception of Socialism, considered as an extension of the revolutionary philosophy and as a new religion, an extension and a realization of Christianity."
This threefold growth would have been impossible if the environment had not been favorable. The Belgian population is congested into industrial towns that are thickly strewn over the country, like the suburbs of one vast manufacturing community. These working people have always been miserably housed and poorly fed. In 1903-05 a public inquiry into housing conditions was instituted in Brussels. In the most congested portions of the city, 564 households, comprising 2,224 persons, lived in one-room tenements. The houses were in miserable condition.
The commission appointed after the riots of 1886 describes conditions that are little better than those that prevailed in England in 1830. Even as late as 1902, out of 750,000 working men and women one-tenth only worked less than ten hours a day; the rest worked from ten to twelve hours. One-fourth of these working people had a wage of 2 francs (40 cents) a day, another fourth had 2 to 3 francs (40 to 60 cents) a day, and the upper section only 3.50 to 4.50 francs (70 cents to 90 cents) a day. The government inquiry in 1896 disclosed the following rate of wages: