I do not wish in any way to exaggerate. France has her corruptions. But the whole set of her thought, even when it abjured Christian “illusions,” was towards solidarity, towards reasonableness, and co-operation. Russia has her vile tyrannies. But from all Russian literature there comes an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach. Great Britain has not yet liquidated her account with Ireland, nor altogether purified her relations with India and Egypt. But Great Britain does not, at any rate, throw aside all plain, pedestrian Christian standards as rubbish. In the Rhineland, too, and in the south there are millions of hearty men and women who are not yet Prussified, and who still think it possible that there may exist a Being greater in some respects than the Imperial Kaiser. But all the central thought of Germany has been for a generation corrupt. It has been foul with the odour of desired shambles. The issue, then, is Europe against the barbarians. It is not easy, perhaps, for anyone living at home in our islands to develop fully What may be called the European sense. You acquire it as you get your sea legs, quickly, but not without actual experience. There underlies the whole Continent a minutely reticulated system of nerves which convey, and multiply, every shock of feeling from one end of it to the other. Here in Brussels we are, for the time at least, at the central _sensorium_. The élan of Belgium takes possession of you. The courage and anguish of this glorious little nation, fighting now for its very life, stir one to something like the clear mood of its own heroism. In every direction there opens a vista of waste and suffering. Already the long trail of wounded has begun to wind its sorrowful way back to the capital. Prisoners arrive, too simple of aspect, one would think, to be the instruments by which Europe is to be tortured to the pattern of a new devilry. You say to yourself, as you hear all the world saying: C’est incroyable! It is not to be believed. It is a nightmare! And then the conviction shapes itself clearly, settles upon and masters your mind, that this German assault on civilisation has got to be repelled and utterly shattered once and for all.