There was no illusion to cloud the minds of King Albert or his Government. The King knew his Kaiser; he had already been menaced by him, and his Chief of Staff von Moltke, in an interview reported by M. Jules Cambon nine months before the war (French Yellow Book, No. 6). He had had every opportunity afforded him of studying the gospel according to Krupp. He knew that, when the ultimatum was delivered at Brussels, the German Army of the Lower Rhine was already massed and was marching on Liége, and that no help could possibly reach him from France or England before the 42 cm.’s had ample time to batter his eastern defences to pieces. He knew also how inadequate were his own military resources; a scheme of reorganisation that would have enabled Belgium to put in the field an army of defence of a million men had indeed been formulated, but was not yet in operation. Every German and pro-German influence in the country was invoked to induce him to break his treaty obligations, and stand aside. The Social Democrats publicly and shamelessly appealed to their Belgian “comrades” to rise superior to “that bourgeois idea, honour.” But the King and his Government held fast. The position of Belgium was as clear as it was terrible. One sometimes hears ill-informed people speak as if the neutrality of that country had been a matter of its own choice, from which it could depart by a new act of choice. This, of course, was not the case. Neutrality was imposed on Belgium, as the price and the correlative of guaranteed independence, by the five Powers whose signatures will be found appended to the treaties of 1831 and 1839. Situated at the cross-roads of Europe, Belgium had by the deliberate policy of Europe been established as a buffer-state, a buffer by land between France and Germany, and by sea between England and the heart of the Continent. Her neutrality was not a commodity to bargain with, but a fundamental condition of her independence; it was her formal duty to preserve it, or at least attempt to preserve it, by force of arms against any invasion. Should any of the guarantors assail it the others were bound to come to its defence. It has been suggested that both France and Great Britain were very ill-prepared to fulfil this obligation; German writers have, indeed, tauntingly gloated over the fact, for it is a fact. The bad faith of Germany was so long evident--her very army manœuvres having been, in fact, based on the hypothesis of a rapid invasion of Belgium--that defensive measures were plainly called for. But two points must be remembered. For one thing, the moral question remains unaltered. You do not justify a murderer by saying that the police ought to have been there to prevent him committing the crime. For another, any new defensive organisation adopted would certainly have been represented by Germany as a clear proof of intended aggression, and would in all likelihood have precipitated the outbreak.