This ancient city, the Oxford of Belgium, has been reduced by the new Huns to a heap of ashes. “Every traveller in Belgium,” says Sir William Robertson Nicoll, “will remember the ancient mediæval town, its wonderful Hotel de Ville, the most perfect piece of architecture in Belgium, the Church of St. Peter, begun in 1425, and the University with its priceless library. All have perished, and why? The civil population had been disarmed, but in a night skirmish German soldiers accidentally fired on their own guard, and it was decided in the panic of the hour to destroy the whole town. A town of forty-five thousand inhabitants, the intellectual metropolis of the Low Countries since the fifteenth century, is now no more than a heap of ashes.” The wanton destruction of this ancient seat of learning, rich in historic associations, was an act of vandalism almost without parallel in history, a crime not only against humanity, but against the generations of future years. The restrained and dignified words in which our own Official Press Bureau made known the ruthless sacking of Louvain constitute a fearful indictment of German Militarism, which can give official sanction to such an appalling deed. Here are the words of the Press Bureau:-- “Ancient and beautiful Louvain, a town of forty-five thousand people, a seat of learning, famous for its ancient and beautiful churches and other buildings, many of them dating from the fifteenth century, has been utterly destroyed by one of the Kaiser’s commanders in a moment of passion to cover the blunder of his own men. The excuse for this unpardonable act of barbarity and vandalism is that a discomfited band of German troops returning to Louvain were fired upon by the people of the town, who had been disarmed a week earlier. The truth is that the Germans, making for the town in disorder, were fired upon by their friends in occupation of Louvain, a mistake by no means rare in war. The assumption of the German commander was, in the circumstances, so wide of probability that it can only be supposed that in the desire to conceal the facts the first idea which occurred to him was seized upon as an excuse for an act unparalleled in the history of civilized people.