That, of course, covers the case of Belgium completely and establishes absolutely that there is, and need be, no breach of neutrality in resistance thus legally sanctioned to illegal interference with neutral rights.

It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the articles that have been torn up.  To refer to the most striking, there is the repeated bombardment of undefended towns, pillage incessant throughout Belgium and Northern France, (Articles 28 and 47;) the levying of illegal contributions, (Articles 49 and 52;) the seizure of cash and securities belonging to private persons, banks, and local authorities, (Articles 52 and 56;) collective penalties for individual acts for which the community as a whole are not responsible, (Article 50.) Articles 50 and 43 should have made impossible the punitive destruction of Vise, Aerschot, Dinant, and Louvain, and numberless villages; Article 56 should have preserved from destruction institutions and buildings dedicated to religion, education, charity, hospitals, &c.  All these wrongful acts, committed everywhere, have been prohibited by these articles.

The gradual introduction of the policy of terrorism has been ably traced by perhaps the highest French authority on international law, Prof.  Edouard Clunet, formerly President of the Institute of International Law, in a recent address.

“Bombardment par intimidation” was adopted by the Germans in 1870 and used at Strassburg, Paris, Peronne, &c., shells being directed and conflagrations spread in the inhabited parts of towns apart from the fortifications.  Germany herself assented to serious mitigations of this practice at the Conference of Brussels in 1874 and at The Hague in 1907.

The worst evolution of the policy of terrorism has been in the throwing from aeroplanes of bombs, explosive or incendiary.  M. Clunet lays down that, by the most recent decision of the institute, bomb throwing from aeroplanes must follow the rules of bombardment by artillery.  This would prohibit such bombs without formal notice.  But in Antwerp bombs were dropped without notice over the Royal Palace, to the peril of the Queen and her young children, and the number of peaceable inhabitants killed or injured was thirty-eight, three children being mutilated in their beds.  In Paris, besides the bombs dropped on Notre Dame, bombs were deliberately dropped in the public streets and a number of peaceable victims killed or wounded.  The dropping of bombs as an act of war on fortresses, ammunition depots, Zeppelin sheds, &c., is, of course, legal.  But the bomb dropping adopted in Belgium and France, and threatened in England, if the opportunity arises, is undisguised terrorism, and not war.

It is important to note also that at Brussels in 1874 Antwerp addressed a petition to the conference praying that any bombardment should be limited to fortifications only.  The commission of the conference, which included three well-known German Generals and two professors, recognized the justice of this plea and recommended Generals to conform to it.