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How thoroughly was Leopold III prepared to mount the throne, he had shown as Crown Prince, partly by serving as an active member of the Belgian Senate and partly by preparing for his father a series of comparative reports on colonial administration in the Belgian Congo, British India, The Netherlands Indies, the Philippines and French Indo-China. It was not simply that Leopold and Astrid "inspected" or showed "interest" on their travels. The Crown Prince everywhere took copious notes of the replies made to his questions, collected and studied reports as he went along, and on returning to Brussels closeted himself for weeks, writing up his own reports to King Albert and preparing his speeches to the Senate. As an instance, His Royal Highness drew the Senate's attention at length to the conditions and prices under which the vital tropical drug quinine was available in the Congo, his recommendations leading to the State's supplying quinine free to the indigent and securing reduced prices for natives whose purchasing power by European standards is low.
Van Zeeland v. Degrelle. Considering the importance of economic forces in the modern world, Belgium's late King Albert gave and King Leopold has given much consideration to whether a modern State should not be managed by an expert or experts, rather than run by a politician or politicians.
In Belgium, the rival Catholic and the Socialist parties and their satellites had jockeyed each other for power to such a comparative standstill that in 1935 it actually became possible for the kingdom to have in Paul van Zeeland a Premier who had never actively belonged to any party, never had stood for election to any office and was primarily a professor of economics and an expert in central banking (TIME, April 8, 1935). Professor van Zeeland was brought in as a compromise coalition Premier chiefly because King Albert had repeatedly brought him in as an economic counselor whose services previous Belgian Cabinets had found effective, disinterested. Under his expert management as Premier the devaluation of the belga—made inevitable by the devaluation of the currencies of the Great Powers —was carried through with skill and success in sharp contrast to the awful bungling at Paris of the devaluation of the franc (TIME, Oct. 5, 1936, et seq.).