It has been sought in the preceding chapters to give as detailed a description as the information at our disposal will allow of the fighting in the North--_i.e._ the struggle for Liège and Namur, and the subsequent series of closely-contested battles from Tirlemont to Mons. The case for the Belgian people, and an account of the sufferings which had to be endured by a peaceful, non-combatant population, will be found mentioned also in the course of the narrative. The diplomatic case for Belgium has already been given to the public in another volume of this series ("How the War Began"); but the details of this case, and the reasons why this country is taking part in the war, have been so well summed up by Mr. Asquith that a few extracts from his speech are necessary to make this volume complete. The first of a series of meetings to bring home to the people of England the vital importance of the questions at issue was held in the Guildhall on Friday, September 4th; and the speakers included the Prime Minister, Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Churchill, and Mr. Balfour. In the course of his remarks Mr. Asquith referred to the Arbitration Treaty between Great Britain and the United States, which he mentioned at a previous Guildhall meeting some three and a-half years previously. "We were very confident three years ago in the rightness of our position," he said. "We are equally confident to-day, when reluctantly and against our will, but with a clear judgment and with a clean conscience we find ourselves involved with the whole strength of this Empire in a bloody arbitrament between Might and Right." Mr. Asquith continued: The issue has passed out of the domain of argument into another field, but let me ask you, and through you the world outside, what would have been our condition as a nation to-day, if we had been base enough, through timidity, or through a perverted calculation of self-interest, or through a paralysis of the sense of honour and duty, if we had been base enough to be false to our word and faithless to our friends? Our eyes would have been turned at this moment, with those of the whole civilised world, to Belgium, a small State, which has lived for more than seventy years under the several and collective guarantee to which we, in common with Prussia and Austria, were parties; and we should have seen, at the instance and by the action of two of these guaranteeing Powers, her neutrality violated, her independence strangled, her territory made use of as affording the easiest and most convenient road to a war of unprovoked aggression against France.