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Updated: June 10, 2025
Those who knew the country and its history were not astonished at the attitude observed by King Albert and his people on August 3, 1914. Quite apart from any foreign sympathies, no other answer could be given to an ultimatum which directly challenged Belgium's rights.
But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right, and after a flash of Belgium's unexampled bravery we were compelled to witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liège fell before overwhelming numbers, then Namur, Ter-monde, Brussels, Louvain, and, last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror!
And the raw material that is indispensable if Belgian industry is to be revived is withheld; the Allies, however, are quite willing to flood the country with manufactured articles." And yet Belgium's demands were extremely modest.
"As he talks to-day at Potsdam and Berlin," says Verhaeren, in his book "Belgium's Agony," "the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousand years ago at Jerusalem." The chronology is characteristic of anti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew reckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of Jerusalem were not Jewish.
In Western Europe Belgium is most enlightened, having practically abolished the visa. France is striving to follow Belgium's lead. England in this matter, as in the matter of her charges for postage, telephones, and railway fares, seems to have completely lost that practical common sense which in the past has distinguished her from other nations.
With a river, lake, and coastwise commerce estimated at over two thousand millions of dollars per year; with railway traffic of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the country, running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry; with over five hundred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at over three thousand millions of dollars; with a realm which, if the density of Belgium's population were possible, would be vast enough to include all the present inhabitants of the world; and with equal rights guaranteed to even the poorest and humblest of our forty millions of people, we can, with a manly pride akin to that which distinguished the palmiest days of Rome, claim as the noblest title of the world, 'I am an American citizen."
By order of the German Government a geographical description of the country has been published, in which every detail of Belgium's wealth in minerals, agriculture, and so on, is described, with no other possible purpose than the desire to whet German Michael's appetite.
Belgium's ecclesiastical architecture, though distinct from the French, is strongly influenced by the French Gothic style, while her civic monuments can only be compared to the Palazzi publici of Florence and Sienna.
The Supreme Council at first demurred, and then desisted from dictation. But its attitude underwent further changes later. Ibid., May 4, 1919. I discussed Belgium's demands in a series of special articles published in The London Daily Telegraph and The Philadelphia Public Ledger in the months of January, February, and March, 1919. In Frisia and Ghelderland. In August, 1919.
It was only on June 30, 1832, that Holland agreed to the exchange of territories and the reduction of Belgium's share of the debt, and even then questions remained as to the dues on the Scheldt and the transit of goods through Dutch Limburg.
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