Thus one has the right to conclude that the whole organism of the "Council of Flanders" is only a foreign tool to serve the enemy in his designs of division and oppression. The delegates of the council cannot pretend to any independence, since the decree of Jan. 18 reduces them to the rôle of functionaries of German authority, named by that authority and expected to contribute, by their advice, to its political work. THE DELEGATES OSTRACIZED The Belgian people, without distinction of language, party, or condition, have, by impressive demonstrations, repudiated the faithless citizens who, joining hands with the enemy, have arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of the Flemings. The Flemings were the first to condemn the crime. To the protests of the Deputies and Senators and of the City Councils have been added those of the leading intellectual and political societies of Flanders. The Flemish Academy raised its voice to "affirm its fidelity to the Belgian Fatherland and its King." The Belgian Labor Party proclaimed that "not one of the 800 labor groups composing it, and not one of its authorized leaders, had been led astray or corrupted by the activist-separatist movement, either in Flanders or in Wallonia." In the streets of Antwerp, of Malines, of Brussels, spontaneous uprisings which the German troops could not suppress voiced the scorn and anger of the crowds. Crowning this expression of the popular will and giving it the sanction of law, the Brussels Court of Appeals, acting upon the protest of the Deputies and Senators, at a plenary sitting of all its united chambers, [Feb. 7, 1918,] ordered a hearing which ended in the arrest of delegates of the "Council of Flanders" on a charge of conspiracy against the form of the State, interference with public functions, and wicked attacks against the constitutional authority of the King, the rights of the chambers, and the laws of the nation. When the German authorities, protecting the guilty ones and acting in the guise of vengeance, caused the arrest of the Presidents of the Court, who had come in the august garb of justice to do their duty, the Court of Cassation, by a decree of Feb. 11, decided unanimously to suspend its sittings; the Courts of Appeals in Ghent and Liége, with all the courts of first instance and the courts of commerce, followed its example. The civic heroism of a whole people is summed up in that impressive gesture. There is no more eloquent page in history. This nation can remain free. It stoically endures the presence and domination of the enemy in its territory. The foreign occupation that has lasted three and a half years has not broken its spirit or its will to resistance. The Flemish, like the Walloon communities, victims of the most frightful brutalities, subjected to a system of forced labor, decimated by deportations, have remained immovably faithful to King and country. The moral unity of the nation has continued intact.