And this brings me to a subject on which I feel very strongly, the folly of removing bullets.  If a bullet is doing any harm, pressing on some nerve, interfering with a joint, or in any way causing pain or inconvenience, by all means let it be removed, though even then it should in most cases never be touched until the wound is completely healed.  But the mere presence of a bullet inside the body will of itself do no harm at all.  The old idea that it will cause infection died long ago.  It may have brought infection with it; but the removal of the bullet will not remove the infection, but rather in most cases make it fire up.  We now know that, provided they are clean, we can introduce steel plates, silver wires, silver nets, into the body without causing any trouble at all, and a bullet is no worse than any of these.  It is a matter in which the public are very largely to blame, for they consider that unless the bullet has been removed the surgeon has not done his job.  Unless he has some specific reason for it, I know that the surgeon who removes a bullet does not know his work.  It may be the mark of a Scotch ancestry, but if I ever get a bullet in my own anatomy, I shall keep it.

IV.  Antwerp

There is no port in Europe which holds such a dominant position as Antwerp, and there is none whose history has involved such amazing changes of fortune.  In the middle of the sixteenth century she was the foremost city in Europe, at its close she was ruined.  For two hundred years she lay prostrate under the blighting influence of Spain and Austria, and throttled by the commercial jealousy of England and Holland.  A few weeks ago she was the foremost port on the Continent, the third in the world; now her wharves stand idle, and she herself is a prisoner in the hands of the enemy.  Who can tell what the next turn of the wheel will bring?

Placed centrally between north and south, on a deep and wide river, Antwerp is the natural outlet of Central Europe towards the West, and it is no wonder that four hundred years ago she gathered to herself the commerce of the Netherlands, in which Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent had been her forerunners.  For fifty years she was the Queen of the North, and the centre of a vast ocean trade with England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, till the religious bigotry of Philip II of Spain and the awful scenes of the Spanish Fury reduced her to ruin.  For two hundred years the Scheldt was blocked by Holland, and the ocean trade of Antwerp obliterated.  Her population disappeared, her wharves rotted, and her canals were choked with mud.  It is hard to apportion the share of wickedness between a monarch who destroys men and women to satisfy his own religious lust, and a nation which drains the life-blood of another to satisfy its lust for gold.  One wonders in what category the instigator of the present war should appear.