Did he see the horrors before him and his people? Did he see the destruction of the most beautiful buildings in the world, the pride of his people? Did he see the tearing down and burning of the entire city of Louvain, with its university and its valuable library containing some of the oldest and most nearly priceless books and manuscripts? Did he see the children and the aged dying by the roadside of hunger and fatigue? Did he see the Belgian men carried off as slaves to work in Germany? Do you think he or his Queen would have hesitated if he had? No one who really knows them thinks so. Nothing can justify choosing the wrong. King Albert, the King of Heroes, and Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians are honored and respected by all who love liberty and justice, for it has been well said, "Treaties and engagements are certainly scraps of paper, just as promises are no more than breaths. But upon such scraps of paper and breaths the fabric of civilization has been built, and without them its everyday activity would come to an end." They represent truly the heroic Belgian people who by their decision on Sunday night, August 2, 1914, saved the world. Queen Elizabeth, although a Bavarian princess, has said of the Germans, "Between them and me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted." The Belgian Minister to the United States said of King Albert after the war had begun: "It is when one talks with our soldiers that one perceives how he is loved; they say, all of them, that they will die for him. He is constantly at their side, encouraging them by his presence and his courage. At certain moments, he adventures too far; always he is in the very midst of combat." [Illustration: KING ALBERT OF BELGIUM] The King and Queen are both of them unusually brave and daring. Not many royal pairs would trust their lives to cross the English Channel and return in an airplane, as they did in the summer of 1918 to attend a celebration held by the King and Queen of England. A Belgian soldier writing of King Albert said: "The King came and placed himself at my side in the trench. He took the rifle of a soldier so tired he could not stand, to give him a chance to rest, and fired, just like the other soldiers, for an hour and a half. He himself often carries their letters to the soldiers and distributes among them the little bundles which their friends and parents send them from the homes now destroyed. He shares their mess with the soldiers and he calls them always 'my friends.' He does not want that they shall do him honor; he wishes simply to be a soldier in all that the word _soldier_ means. One night he was seen, exhausted by fatigue, sleeping on the grass at the side of the road." Do you wonder that the Belgians love their King and that the world honors him as the Hero King of a Nation of Heroes? DEFENSE OF LIÉGE