What strikes us now, when recalling this memorable ceremony, is not so
much the address itself as the choice of its text: "For they that
carried us away captive required of us a song."

Many of those who listened to Cardinal Mercier on July 21st, 1916, have
no doubt been "carried away" by now, and they have sung. They have sung
the Brabançonne and the "Lion de Flandres" as a last defiance to their
oppressors whilst those long cattle trains, packed with human cattle,
rolled in wind and rain towards the German frontier. And the echo of
their song still haunts the sleep of every honest man.

* * * * *

For whatever Germany may do or say, the time is no longer when such
crimes can be left unpunished. Notwithstanding the war and the
triumphant power of the mailed fist, there still exists such a thing as
public conscience and public opinion. Nothing can happen, in any part of
the world, without awakening an echo in the hearts of men who apparently
are not at all concerned in the matter. The Germans are too clever not
to understand this, and the endless trouble which they take in order to
monopolise the news in neutral countries and to encounter every
accusation with some more or less insidious excuse is the best proof of
this. When one of them declared that Raemaekers' cartoons had done more
harm to Germany than an army corps, he knew perfectly well what he was
talking about. Only they rely so blindly on their own intellectual power
and they have such a poor opinion of the brains of other people that
they believe in first doing whatever suits their plans and then justify
their action afterwards. They divide the work between themselves: The
soldier acts, the lawyer and the professor undertakes to explain what he
has done. However black the first may become, there is plenty of