They have really, as I have already said and as history will one day establish with greater eloquence and authority than mine, they have really saved Latin civilization.  They had stood for centuries at the junction of two powerful and hostile forms of culture.  They had to choose and they did not hesitate.  Their choice was all the more significant, all the more instructive, inasmuch as none was so well qualified as they to choose with a full knowledge of what they were doing.  You are all aware that more than half of Belgium is of Teutonic stock.  She was therefore, thanks to her racial affinities, better able than any other to understand the culture that was being offered her, together with the imputation of dishonour which it included.  She understood it so well that she rejected it with an outbreak of horror and disgust unparalleled in violence, spontaneous, unanimous and irresistible, thus pronouncing a verdict from which there was no appeal and giving the world a peremptory lesson sealed with every drop of her blood.

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But to-day she is at the end of her resources.  She has exhausted not her courage but her strength.  She has paid with all that she possesses for the immense service which she has rendered to mankind.  Thousands and thousands of her children are dead; all her riches have perished; almost all her historic memories, which were her pride and her delight, almost all her artistic treasures, which were numbered among the fairest in this world, are destroyed for ever.  She is nothing more than a desert whence stand out, more or less intact, four great towns alone, four towns which the Rhenish hordes, for whom the epithet of barbarians is in point of fact too honourable, appear to have spared only so that they may keep back one last and monstrous revenge for the day of the inevitable rout.  It is certain that Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels are doomed beyond recall.  In particular, the admirable Grand’Place, the Hotel de Ville and the Cathedral at Brussels are, I know, undermined:  I repeat, I know it from private and trustworthy testimony against which no denial can prevail.  A spark will be enough to turn one of the recognized marvels of Europe into a heap of ruins like those of Ypres, Malines and Louvain.  Soon after—­for, short of immediate intervention, the disaster is as certain as though it were already accomplished—­Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent will suffer the same fate; and in a moment, as I was saying the other day, there will vanish from sight one of the corners of this earth in which the greatest store of memories, of historic matter and artistic beauties had been accumulated.

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