Ah, only those who lived in the midst of Belgium’s agony, who beheld a guiltless people verily crucified as recompense for their loyalty to honour and truth, can fully appreciate the wrong that was done them! Only those who saw with their own eyes the callous and inhuman rage of the invader’s earlier treatment,—when, confident of conquering a startled world with every diabolical device of destruction which mind could conceive, he ignored all laws, and deliberately aimed at crushing the very heart of this little land that had done no wrong,—only those can understand with what contempt, what _loathing_, we who did witness it came to look upon the ruler and the chiefs of that race whose history has been thus stained! For we saw these people starving while Germany was seizing their crops, their horses, cows, even the contents of dry-goods and other shops; shipping away the coal, for need of which so many perished during the cold winters; taking all fats, so that butter was unprocurable and milk too rare and dear for the poor to buy. We beheld the famished mothers struggling to keep their fading children alive on what charity could provide—so small a portion for each of the many thousands to be cared for!—the country’s youth stricken down with tuberculosis, and honest men driven to thieving and crime! Indeed, the bare sight of those lines of hunger-wan creatures, stretching like black stains through the city, awoke depressing conjectures as to whether man’s intelligence was, after all, of a higher order than that of beasts, or merely the same limited capacity, artificially burnished! Through nearly two-thirds of the civilized world, life, beauty, and the harvests of ages were being ruthlessly and insanely destroyed; every principle of right, every element of higher sentiment scorned or ignored, in a senseless and hideous conflict between men—between the most exalted of all living creatures! Truth, the acknowledgment of a higher Power, and even kindred sympathy—manifested even by the lowest animals—were sacrificed day after day to an atrocious passion, costing millions of lives, billions of wealth, and a loss in treasures, in architecture, literature, and art such as a thousand years of labour can never replace! What wonder that individuals did not escape the almost universal retrogression, and that, amid a people who had so nobly stood loyal to their ideals, dishonesty and contempt for law gradually developed from the festering and unalleviated wounds unjustly dealt them! Signs of this inevitable consequence of war became apparent later, not only in Brussels, but throughout the whole of Belgium, as in Russia and (more or less) in all the involved nations.