To-day I have not come to speak of monuments, of historical relics, nor even of the wrongs committed, of the violation of all the rights and laws of warfare and every international convention, of incendiarism, pillage and massacre; I have come simply to utter before you the last distressful cry of a dying nation.

At this moment a tragedy is being enacted in Belgium such as has no precedent in the history of civilized peoples, nor even in that of the barbarians, for the barbarians, when committing their most stupendous crimes, lacked the infernal deliberation and the scientific, all-powerful means of working evil which to-day are in the hands of those who profit by the resources and benefits of civilization only to turn them against it and to seek the annihilation of all its noblest and most generous characteristics.  The despairing rumours of this tragedy come to us only through the chinks of that ensanguined well which isolates it from the rest of the world.  Nothing reaches our ears but the lies of the enemy.  In reality, the whole of Belgium is one huge Prussian prison, where every cry is cruelly and methodically stifled and where no voices are heard save those of the gaolers.  Only now and again, after a thousand adventures, despite a thousand perils, a letter from some kinsman or captive friend arrives from the depths of that great living cemetery, bringing us a gleam of authentic truth.

2

You are as familiar with this truth as I am.  At the moment when her soil was invaded, Belgium numbered seven million seven hundred thousand inhabitants.  It is estimated that between two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand have perished in battle or massacre, or as the result of misery and privation; and I am not speaking of the infant children, the sacrifice of whom, owing to the dearth of milk, has, it appears, been frightful.  Five or six hundred thousand unfortunates have fled to Holland, France or England.  There remain therefore in the country nearly seven million inhabitants; and more than half of these seven millions are living almost exclusively on American charity.  In what is above all an industrial country, producing normally, in time of peace, less than a third part of the wheat necessary for home consumption, the enemy has systematically requisitioned everything, carried off everything, for the upkeep of his armies, and has sent into Germany what he could not consume on the spot.  The result of so monstrous a proceeding may readily be divined:  on all that soil, once so happy and so rich, to-day taxed and pillaged and pillaged again, ravaged and devastated by fire and the sword, there is nothing left.  And the situation of suffering Belgium is so cruelly paradoxical that her best friends, her dearest allies, even those whom she has saved, are powerless to succour her.  Isolated as she is from the rest of the world, she would have starved even though nothing had been taken from her.  Now she has been despoiled of all that she possessed,