Flemish is scarcely distinguishable from Dutch. Although philologically they may be regarded as twin dialects of one tongue, they are for practical purposes the same. There are, to be sure, a few slight differences of idiom, and numerous differences of vocabulary, even between standard written Flemish and standard written Dutch, but scarcely more important than those between the English of Mr. Howells and the English of Mr. Hardy. In popular speech the gap is naturally wider, and perhaps justifies the view that Flemish and Dutch are separate dialects of one language, though "dialect" may really be too strong a word. From my own observation in East Flanders, I should say that a Dutchman would be in about the same situation there with regard to difference of speech as a New Englander in Virginia. According to the census of 1910, there were in Belgium about 3,832,000 persons speaking French or belonging to French-speaking families, and about 4,153,000 speaking Flemish or belonging to Flemish families. The Flemish population, being to a larger extent agricultural, has for many years been increasing faster than the Walloons. Yet French, being by acquisition or second-nature a language perfectly familiar to all educated Belgians, appears to have, and really has, an immense advantage over Flemish. The literature of the French language is enriched and glorified with the names of many great authors, from Jean Froissart and Philippe de Comines to Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who belong by birth or residence to what we now call Belgium. But the Flemish had, and probably always will have, a pride of their own. In the Middle Ages their cities were among the first in Northern Europe to emerge from obscurity. The names of Flemish towns strike the ear with a strange ruggedness in the liquid lapse of Dante's lines, but a stranger thing it is that even in the thirteenth century these vigorous municipalities were looked to for independence, and called upon for vengeance on tyranny; we hear, in the Purgatorio, of "the evil plant that overshadows all the Christian land," and are told that "if Douai, Lille, Ghent and Bruges had power, there would soon be vengeance taken." A curious example this of "ancestral voices prophesying war."