The same doom awaited Holland, although Herr von Jagow, shortly before the German ultimatum was sent to Brussels, had taken care to assure the Dutch minister that the neutrality of his country would be respected. Was not Holland in the Middle Ages one of the jewels of the Germanic Imperial crown? With her shores washed by the North Sea, and the estuary of the Rhine flowing through her midst, did she not command the course of Germany’s greatest river? According to the view of the Chancellor, as set forth in his telegram of 4th August to Prince Lichnowsky, would not an annexation of Belgium by force or guile involve similar treatment of the Orange Kingdom? The conversation in which Herr Zimmermann clumsily dangled before the eyes of the Dutch Socialist Troelstra an invitation to Holland to enter the Zollverein after the war gave our Dutch friends a glimpse of Germany’s designs on their country. The King of Bavaria took it upon himself to give them another glimpse, when he declared, with the blunt frankness of a peasant from his own highlands, that the Germans needed the whole course of the Rhine down to the sea. This would imply occupying the mouth of the Meuse and the estuary of the Scheldt. Denmark, again, possesses one of the keys to the Baltic; can she forget, after the bitter experience she has had, the voracious appetite of her dread neighbour? This picture, by no means overdrawn, of the blessings in store for us after a German triumph, must prove to my fellow-citizens that, in order to escape them, our King and Government took the only path open to them in an agonizing Calvary—the path of honour. There was nothing for it but to defend our freedom, sword in hand, at the price of the nation’s best blood—a freedom that the Germans, after defeating France, would have withheld from us all the more scornfully if we had been weak enough to listen to them and cowardly enough to obey them. CONCLUSION.