on all that soil, once so happy and so rich, to-day taxed and pillaged
and pillaged again, ravaged and devastated by fire and the sword,
there is nothing left. And the situation of suffering Belgium is so
cruelly paradoxical that her best friends, her dearest allies, even
those whom she has saved, are powerless to succour her. Isolated as
she is from the rest of the world, she would have starved even though
nothing had been taken from her. Now she has been despoiled of all
that she possessed, while France and England can send her neither
money nor provisions, for they would fall into the hands of those
engaged in torturing her, so much so that every attempt on their part
to alleviate her sufferings would but retard her deliverance still
further. Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate
tragedy? It is a fact that in the midst of this war we are constantly
finding ourselves confronted with events such as history hitherto has
never beheld. A people resembling an enormous beast of prey, in order
to punish a loyalty and heroism which, if it retained the slightest
notion of justice and injustice, the smallest sense of human dignity
and honour, it ought to worship on its knees: this vast predatory race
stealthily resolved to exterminate an inoffensive little nation whose
soul it felt was too great to be enslaved or reduced to the semblance
of its conqueror's. It was on the point of succeeding, amid the
silence, the impotence, or the terror of the world, when from beyond
the Atlantic a generous nation took that heroic little people under
its protection. It understood that what was involved was not merely an
act of justice and elementary pity, but also and more particularly a
higher duty towards the morality and the eternal conscience of
mankind. Thanks to this great nation's intervention, it will not be
said, in the days to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and heroism
are no more than dangerous illusions and a fool's bargain, or that
evil must necessarily, at all times and places, conquer whenever it is