Our most sacred political and economic interests are menaced by these absurd plans. The organic whole which has made of Belgium, through its commerce and industry, its rivers, ports and railways, its agriculture and workingmen, all working together under a single Government through scores of years, an economic power of the first order, would be dissolved, artificially weakened by contradictory influences, enervated by divergent official policies. The narrow particularism which in the past and present has done so much harm would dominate. The balance between the different political, religious, and social tendencies in our country would be destroyed, and Belgium would be left in a state of crisis which, through long years, would render almost impossible the relief of the country and the curing of the wounds caused by the war. RIGHTS OF FLEMISH TONGUE In the years before the war the Belgian Parliament passed several laws intended to assure to the Flemish language the place that belongs to it in the national life, especially in the administrative, judicial, and educational departments. It will suffice to recall the law of May 12, 1910, on secondary schools, and the law of July 2, 1913, on languages in the army, making a knowledge of Flemish and French obligatory for admission to the National Military School. At the moment when the war broke out the Parliament was considering a proposition tending to organize Flemish high schools, and in a report to the King, Oct. 8, 1916, the Government declared itself "convinced that immediately upon the re-establishment of peace a general agreement of favorable sentiments, which it will try to promote, will assure to the Flemings, both in the higher schools and in all the others, that complete equality, in right and in fact, which ought to exist under the guarantees of our Constitution." (Moniteur, Oct. 8-14, 1916.) Only after the war can the Government solve the problems arising out of the Flemish movement. The promoters of that movement themselves deplore the intervention of an alien power and scorn the traitors who have conspired with the enemy, accepting money and positions at his hand. It is as loyal Belgian citizens, they declare, that they are striving for reforms from which they expect a fuller intellectual development of Flemish communities, and they see in such culture a new force of unity for the nation, from which they by no means wish to be separated. BELGIAN PREMIER'S VIEW _Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Prime Minister, said to a correspondent of The London Times:_ The Belgian people, after three and a half years of the most grinding oppression, have shown by the courageous defiance of enemy bayonets which brought about the collapse of the "activist" plot, that they have lost none of their sturdy resolve to be free; that the spirit which moved them to reject the German ultimatum of Aug. 2, 1914, is as strong as ever. * * *