“Deep and deadly must be the vengeance which the defenders of civilization will exact from these new apostles of brutality. Even Attila had his better side. He spared Milan. It has been said of him that, though he destroyed cities without remorse, he respected the laws of nations as they were understood in his day. The modern Attila respects neither the laws of nations nor the laws of God. His evil deeds cry aloud to Heaven and to the horror-struck watching nations. The infamous crime of the destruction of Louvain is without a parallel even in the dark ages. The harmless civil population had been disarmed a week ago. The German garrison at the gates of the town fired upon another force of their own countrymen. To conceal their blunder, they laid the blame upon the helpless townspeople. No denials were listened to. Some of the men of Louvain were shot, the rest were made prisoners, the women and children were flung into trains and carried off to an unknown destination, and the city was razed to the ground. Louvain has ceased to exist. A town of forty thousand inhabitants, bigger than Crewe or Dover or Colchester or Keighley, has been completely wiped out. The wickedness of this abominable act shall be expiated to the uttermost when the day of reckoning comes. “Until now we have maintained an attitude of deliberate reserve upon the innumerable tales of German atrocities which have reached us. We published without comment the unanswerable list of shocking excesses committed by the German troops, which was sent to England by the Belgian authorities. When a German Zeppelin cast bombs upon ill-fated women asleep in their beds at Antwerp, we did no more than explain the bearings of international law upon conduct which has met with universal reprobation in Europe and America. But now the real object of German savagery is self-revealed, not only by the effacement of Louvain, but by the shameful admissions sent forth from the wireless station at Berlin. Last Thursday night the following official notification regarding Belgium came vibrating through the air:-- “‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unstinting severity and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.’ “Such is the cynical nature of the German apologia for the destruction of Louvain. Such is the character of the warfare of the modern Huns. They seek to strike terror into the hearts of their foes by methods which belong to the days of the old barbaric hosts, who were thought to have vanished from the world for ever. There must be no mistake about the opportionment of blame for this and numberless other crimes. We have listened too long to the bleatings of professors bemused by the false glamour of a philosophy which the Germans themselves have thrust aside.