It was not necessary for Sabinsport to receive Patsy's letter in order to make up its mind about the invasion of Belgium. There were many things involved in the Great War that Sabinsport was to learn only after long months of slow and cumbersome meditation, months upon months of wearing, puzzled watching. They were things hard for her to learn, for they contradicted all her little teaching in world relations and bade her enter where the traditions of her land as she had learned them had forbidden her to go; they forced her, a landsman, to whom the seas and their laws and meanings were remote and unreal, to come to a realization of what the seas meant to her, the things she made and the children she bore; they forced her to understand that the flag and laws which protected her homes must protect ships on the water, for as her home was her castle so were ships the sailor's castle; they forced her to lay aside old prejudices against England; they forced her to a passion of pity and pride and protective love for France; they forced her to an understanding of the utter contradiction between her beliefs and ideals and the beliefs and ideals of the Power that had brought the war on the world. Poor little Sabinsport! Born only to know and to desire her own corner of the earth, wishing only that her people should be free to work out their lives in peace--she had a long road to travel before her mind could grasp the mighty problems the Great War had put up to the peoples of the earth, before her heart could feel as her own the passions and aspirations that burned and drove onward the scores of big and little peoples that fate had brought into the struggle. But there was no problem in Belgium's case. Germany had sworn to respect her neutrality and she had broken her oath. She had followed this breach of faith with unheard of violence, destruction, wantonness, pillage, cruelty, lust. This was true. Now Sabinsport was simple-minded. She was not very good--that is, not without her own cynicism, hard-headedness, hypocrisies. She didn't pretend to any great virtue, but she would not stand for broken contracts. "You couldn't do business that way," was the common feeling in Sabinsport. She was harsh with people who broke bargains and saw to it always they were punished. If the sinner was able by influence in bribery or cleverness to escape the law, Sabinsport punished him in her own way. She never forgot and she built up a cloud of suspicion about the man so that he knew she had not forgotten. Men had left Sabinsport because of her intangible, persistent disapproval of violated agreements, repudiated debts. The invasion of Belgium, then, was classed in the town's mind with the things she wouldn't stand for.