More than three months ago, I was in one of the grandest of your
cities, a city that welcomed in a manner which I shall never forget
the cause which I had come among you to represent. I was there, as I
told my hearers at the time, in the name of the last remnants of
beauty that the barbarians had left us, to plead with the land of
every kind of beauty. Those threatened beauties, our only cities yet
intact, the treasures and sanctuaries of our whole past and of all our
race, are still reeling on the brink of the same abyss and, failing a
miracle which we dare not hope for, they will suffer the fate of
Ypres, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Dixmude and so many other less
illustrious victims. The danger in which they stand has no doubt
aroused the indignation of the civilized world; but not a hand has
armed itself to defend them. I blame no one; I reproach no one; the
morality of the nations is a virtue that has not yet emerged from the
state of infancy; and fortunately, by the hazard of war, it is not yet
too late to save four innocent cities.

To-day I have not come to speak of monuments, of historical relics,
nor even of the wrongs committed, of the violation of all the rights
and laws of warfare and every international convention, of
incendiarism, pillage and massacre; I have come simply to utter before
you the last distressful cry of a dying nation.

At this moment a tragedy is being enacted in Belgium such as has no
precedent in the history of civilized peoples, nor even in that of
the barbarians, for the barbarians, when committing their most
stupendous crimes, lacked the infernal deliberation and the
scientific, all-powerful means of working evil which to-day are in the
hands of those who profit by the resources and benefits of
civilization only to turn them against it and to seek the annihilation