And in any town that had been left alone during the nineteenth century, particularly in Bruges, as well as in many of those the Prussians have destroyed, everything seems to fall into picturesque and beautiful compositions that are the despair of modern planners and “improvers” of cities. Here again the results were quite unpremeditated. You cannot imagine the builders of the Gruuthüse in Bruges carefully arranging their effects of gables and turrets and mullioned windows with scrupulous regard to the soaring tower of Our Lady’s Church; you cannot imagine the wealthy burghers who from time to time reared the varied structures along the canal and the Quai du Rosaire or in the Rue de l’Ane Aveugle (the names are as joyful as the architecture) or around the Pont du Béguinage, working studiously for their dramatic effects with square and triangle, tentative models, and perhaps the able advice of a “Landscape Architect” or a “Scenic Artist.” If they had done this they might have produced a tolerable stage-setting or even a superior sort of world’s fair, but they would not have built Bruges. No, the conviction has been growing, and is now forced on us by a revealing war, that even in the seventeenth century there were those who possessed a civilisation and a culture beside which ours is a kind of raw barbarism; that they by force of this, and with the aid of a tradition of still greater days in the past, built by instinct as we cannot build by erudition; and that whatever issued from their hands was admirable and honourable and lastingly fair. It is well for us to remember sometimes when we amuse ourselves by discourse as to “inalienable rights of man,” and that sort of thing, that there is one such over which no argument is possible, and that is the right to beauty in life and thought and environment, and that those who filched this from us during the century and a half just passed (and for the first time in history) were tyrants and robbers of the same stamp and degree as their immediate predecessors, who destroyed the other right of man to free and joyful labour as well as that to the genuine self-government and the sane and wholesome democracy that marked the Middle Ages and vanished with the despots and the dogmas of the Renaissance; not to return, so far as we ourselves can perceive of our own experience. God grant we may retain what is still left us in Flanders and Brabant. If by the triumph of coal and iron either through war or (perhaps even worse) through the imposition on territories thus far spared of the ideals and methods of an efficient industrialism, we lose Bruges as we have lost Ypres and Arras and Malines and Termonde, as we had already lost, though in a different way, Liége and Lille, Mons and Namur, then by so much (and it is very much) have we lost our hidden leaven that in the fulness of time we rely on for the lightening of the whole dull lump of our misguided and now discredited life. VIII COAL AND IRON