_Famine in Belgium_ “When the German conquers Belgium and Poland the first thing he does is to raise agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of immediate prosperity. Gain and comfort for the new subjects cling to the soles of his feet.” Thus the Rev. Gerhard Tolzien preaching in Schwerin Cathedral last autumn at the harvest festival held on the 19th Sunday after Trinity. We must suppose he believed it. One of the stock attributes of Kultur, proclaimed by its apostles and obediently repeated by their pupils, is the beneficent influence it sheds on other lands. It showers gratuitous benefits on all, but only those fortunate enough to be brought under German sway reap the full harvest of its blessings. So the domination of the world by Germany is justified. It is for the people’s good; it would be the millennium. Raemaekers shows it to us at work in Belgium. We see the Germans who have conquered the land carrying out those beneficent functions described by the German preacher. Having brought agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of unprecedented prosperity, they are watching, with benevolent satisfaction, the signs of gain and comfort among the inhabitants. If the emaciated peasants, leaving their roofless cottage, limping down the empty street with the few odds and ends of rubbish not worth looting which they still possess, or stopping to poke about in the gutter for a scrap of food--if they seem to be at the last extremity of misery, that is, no doubt, because they are too dull to appreciate the blessings of Kultur. Truly this is a terrible picture, a veritable nightmare. There is nothing more poignant in the whole series. It would be a relief to be able to believe Herr Tolzien’s account, but we fear that the ghastly contrast drawn by the neutral artist is only too well founded on fact. A. SHADWELL. [Illustration] _Poor Old Thing_ An old English proverb, disdaining to be cramped by so feeble and academic a thing as grammar, tells us that “courtesy is cumbersome to him that kens it not.” It is one of the essential signs of breeding that courtesy is natural and not cumbersome; and if we may take the saying of the German naval officer as true, that the English will always be fools and the Germans will never be gentlemen (though it is true that the maker of such a saying must be a gentleman himself), we shall be able to understand much about the Central Powers that is otherwise puzzling. Despite their aristocracies and their history, and this applies especially to Austria, those Powers have a streak of cheapness running through them. They are cads. They snarl and bicker with each other like a grocer’s family in a back parlor. Unlike Lamb’s “party in a parlor,” they are not all silent; possibly the rest of the sentence holds true. Where was Wilhelm? Why doesn’t Franz Joseph do better? But for him we’d have done such and such. Why didn’t the fellow do better?