Each town, however, stood for itself alone. The idea of government by the populace on the market-place was common to them all, but they were kept apart by the exclusive spirit of commercial jealousy. The thirst for material prosperity consumed them; but they had no bond of union, and each was ready to advance its own interests at the expense of its rivals. Therefore, either in the face of foreign invasion, or when the policy of some Count led to revolt and civil war, it was seldom that the people of Flanders were united. 'L'Union fait la Force' is the motto of modern Belgium, but in the Middle Ages there was no powerful central authority round which the communes rallied. Hence the spectacle of Ghent helping an English army to storm the ramparts of Ypres, or of the Guildsmen of Bruges girding on their swords to strike a blow for Count Louis of Maele against the White Hoods who marched from Ghent. Hence the permanent unrest of these Flemish towns, the bickerings and the sheddings of blood, the jealousy of trade pitted against trade or of harbour against harbour, the insolence in the hour of triumph and the abject submission in the hour of defeat, and all the evils which discord brought upon the country. No town suffered more than Ypres from the distracted state of Flanders, which, combined with the ravages of war and the religious dissensions of the sixteenth century, reduced it from the first rank amongst the cities of the Netherlands to something very like the condition of a quiet country town in an out-of-the-way corner of England. That is what the Ypres of to-day is like--a sleepy country town, with clean, well-kept streets, dull and uninteresting save for the stately Cloth Hall, which stands there a silent memorial of the past. FOOTNOTES. [Footnote 13: Bicycles entering Belgium pay an _ad valorem_ duty of 12 per cent.] [Footnote 14: Thuin,' or 'tuin,' in Flemish means an enclosed space, such as a garden plot.] [Footnote 15: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, part ii., chapter vi.] [Footnote 16: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, part ii., chapter vi.] [Footnote 17: Letter from Vauban to Louvois on the fortifications of Ypres, 1689; Vereecke, pp. 325-357.] [Footnote 18: The evolution of Ypres from a feudal tower on an island until it became a great fortress can be traced in a very interesting volume of maps and plans published by M. Vereecke in 1858, as a supplement to his _Histoire Militaire d'Ypres_. It shows the first defensive works, those erected by Vauban, the state of the fortifications between 1794 and 1814, and what the English engineers did in 1815.] [Footnote 19: Vereecke, p. 41.] CHAPTER VIII FURNES--THE PROCESSION OF PENITENTS