Under the Belgian constitution the communes enjoy the maximum of freedom. Civic pride nowhere else burns so bright. It is the habit of local self-government, the strong personalities developed under this system, and the spirit of the communes that have saved Belgium from starvation during the war. As every one of Mr. Hoover's American delegates in Belgium will testify, the spectacle was and is magnificent. As early as October, 1914, when the wave of invasion had passed over Belgium, the communes stood firm, and in all of them committees with almost absolute power, and enjoying the perfect confidence of the people, were formed and got to work commandeering the visible supply of food and distributing it prudently. Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau for dealing with "the Flemish question," a bureau consisting of German specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention. Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium. I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. "Do you see that man?" said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. "He lived here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his life will not be safe."