for no offence at all.  For the German judges are in a hurry, and they have no time to enquire too closely in such matters.  The vengeance of a spy, the slightest suspicion of a policeman, sometimes even an anonymous letter, are enough to convince them of the guilt of the accused person.  The healthy effect produced on the population by Dinant and Louvain must not be allowed to spend itself.  Frightfulness must be kept up at any price.  The reign of terror is the condition of the German regime.

* * * * *

To-day, in this most tragic hour of Belgian history, when so many leaders, so many patriots, have been imprisoned, deported or shot, after twenty-nine months of constant threats and persecutions, we might ask ourselves:  Is Belgium at last cowed into submission?

Listen, then, to Belgium’s voice, not to the voice of the refugees, not even to the voice of the King and his Government, but to the voice of these miserable “slaves” whom Germany is trying to starve into submission.  Letters have been dropped from these cattle trucks rolling towards Germany or towards the French front.  They all tell us of the unshakeable resolution of the men never to sign an agreement to go to Germany, and never to work for the enemy:  “We will never work for the Germans and never put our name on paper” (onze naam on papier zetten)—­“We will not work for them.  Do the same when you are taken.” (Faites de meme quand tu dois aller.) Two young men imprisoned in Ghent write to their father:  “They will have to make us fast a long time before we consent to work for the King of Prussia.”  Another man who was stopped when attempting to escape writes:  “They tell us here that the Germans will make us work even if we do not sign an engagement.  It would be abominable. Take heart, the hour of deliverance will strike one day, after all.”  Another workman sends the following message to his employer:  “We are here two thousand and three hundred men.  They cannot annihilate us. It is not right that our fate should be better than that of our brothers who suffer and fight at the front.  We cannot make a step without being threatened by the gun or the bayonet of our jailors. I am hungry ... but I will not work for them.”

And as the slave raids reach one province after another from Flanders to Antwerp, from Hainant to Brabant, as the fatal list of deportees increases from 20,000 to 50,000, from 50,000 to 100,000, from 100,000 to 200,000, whilst the cries of women and children are heard in the streets, whilst the modern slaves tramp along the roads carrying a light bundle of clothes on their shoulders, from everywhere in Belgium the strongest protests are sent to the Governor General, by the communes which will not consent to give the names of the unemployed, by the magistrates who will not see the last guarantees of individual right trampled upon, by the Socialist syndicates which are defending the right of the workmen not to work against their own country, by the chiefs of industry who show clearly that the whole responsibility of the labour crisis rests on Germany alone, by the bishops of the Church, who refuse to admit that, after two thousand years of Christian teaching, a so-called Christian nation should fall so low as to revive, for her own benefit, the worst custom of Paganism.