Brussels to-day is rent by conflicting emotions. Frenzied rage, poignant anxiety, and boiling excitement are struggling not so much for mastery as for satisfactory expression. The news of the forthcoming occupation of Antwerp by a British Army Corps has not been received here with expressions of unmixed satisfaction. The very fact that the negotiations were kept wholly secret, with the result that the announcement of so important a decision first reached us through the public report of the debate in the House of Commons, has, whether justly or otherwise matters not, set a vast number of well meaning people by the ears. When the news reached Brussels yesterday it produced an extravagant sensation which grew as the night advanced. By tacit consent people refused to go to bed—clubs and cafés were kept open till morning, and all through the principal thoroughfares the noise of heated discussions might be heard in full blast round the tables outside the cafés and at every street corner. A large section of the population, in which ranked many of the better classes, were greatly incensed against the King’s Government. ‘It is not astonishing,’ they said, ‘that the measure was kept secret; otherwise the people would never have permitted so infamous a traffic!’ All the old arguments of 1859 and the half dozen succeeding years were revived, and in every group of angry disputants the name of Adelson Castiau continually recurrent, was flung passionately on the night with every varied accent of which the human voice is capable. ‘_Il l’a bien dit, Castiau._ He knew, he foresaw what must happen, and idiots that we were, we would not listen.’ This was the prevailing cry. It must be explained that M. Adelson Castiau—who is just at present given posthumous rank as a hero and patriot—was an eminent lawyer and ex-deputy, who, from the first, vehemently opposed the fortification of Antwerp. From the day when in 1859 a committee of twenty-seven officers were appointed to discuss the subject until the completion of the immense work some six years later, M. Castiau waged war against the scheme. He spoke, wrote, organised committees, and headed deputations protesting against the plan. His argument was that, from a military point of view, the project involved in principle the abandonment of the country and a shameful flight by the army towards the ‘Polders de l’Escaut,’ where certainly no one would ever come to molest it, but would be quite content to leave it to be destroyed by marsh fevers. The fortification of Antwerp, he said later, meant the destruction of our neutrality. Antwerp offers to-day, with her forty kilometres of heavily-armed works, her citadel and her dozen attached forts, a standing invitation to invasion. It was handing over the country to the first comer, and building up one of the finest military and commercial positions in the world, only for the benefit of England, which had coveted it for over a century.