Foreign occupation has not wholly destroyed legitimate and regular representation in Belgium. The Provincial Councils and the City Councils are still functioning. The administrative framework of the country survives. The municipal organization, so solidly rooted, has not ceased to exercise power. The Provincial and Municipal Councilors, like the Deputies and Senators, most of whom remain in the country, have been elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage. They alone in the occupied territory are competent to express the true national opinion, and that opinion is strikingly voiced in the protest of the Flemish and Walloon members of Parliament, in that of the Common Councils of the capital and the large cities of Antwerp and Ghent, whose example has been followed by an increasing number of prominent citizens and local Governments of smaller towns in Flanders. It has been demonstrated that the "Council of Flanders" is pursuing an enterprise of usurpation, that it is a tool of the invader, and that its members are in reality only agents of the German authorities. They went to Berlin a year ago to ask for administrative separation. Herr von Walraff met them at Brussels at the beginning of 1918 to arrange for political separation. When Tack and Borms were arrested by the Belgian police on the order of Belgian Magistrates it was the German functionaries who, by force, compelled their release, and they came out of prison by the side of the German officer who had liberated them. It was the Kommandantur of Antwerp that ordered the communal administration, disregarding its resistance, to authorize the "activist" demonstration of Feb. 3, and to have this protected by the police, in violation of orders of the Burgomaster that had been in force nearly four years. It was the German military headquarters, too, that forbade all demonstrations of other groups and commandeered the hall of the Chamber of Commerce, placing it at the disposition of the organizers of a demonstration judged by the Burgomaster to be one to wound public sentiment and endanger the public peace.[1] [Footnote 1: Later the City Councils were forbidden by German authority to debate political questions, such as the autonomy of Flanders.] At length Governor General von Falkenhausen stamped the "Council of Flanders" with the seal of German investiture, deciding by a decree of Jan. 18, 1918, (published Feb. 10,) that the appointment of the "council's" delegates was subject to his ratification, and that these delegates were called to collaborate with him in his legislative labors.