could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with
the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings
in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in
that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and
military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Trèves or
Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the
arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather
from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which
determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom,
was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Cæsar's
adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The
Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that
same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be
checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the
marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it
was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within
sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was
hoped--the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo--again showed what this
territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following
upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to
curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian
Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French