The contemplation of History, so a great master of the art has told us, may not make men wise but it is sure to make them sad. The austere Muse has never had a sadder page to show than that which is even now being added to her record. We see now the full fruition of the German doctrine of the beatitude of War. In sorrow and in anguish, in anguish and in darkness, Belgium is weeping for her children and will not be comforted because they are not. The invader has spared neither age nor sex, neither rank nor function, and every insult that malice could invent, or insolence inspire, has been heaped upon her bowed head. The hearths are cold, the altars desecrated, the fields untilled, the granaries empty. The peasant watches the heavens but he may not sow, he has regarded his fields but he might not reap. The very stones in her cities cry out; hardly one of them is left upon another. No nation had ever given Europe more blithe and winning pledges of her devotion to the arts of peace. The Flemish school of painters had endowed the world with portraits of a grave tenderness which posterity might always admire but could never imitate. The chisels of her medieval craftsmen had left us a legacy of buoyant fancy in stone whose characters were alive for us with the animation of the Canterbury Tales. All this the invader has stamped out like the plague. A once busy and thriving community begs its bread in alien lands. Never since the captivity of Babylon has there been so tragic an expatriation. Yet noble in her sorrow and exalted in her anguish, Belgium, like some patient caryatid, still supports the broken architrave of the violated Treaty. Her little army is still unconquered, her spirit is never crushed. She will arise purified by her sorrow and ennobled by her suffering, and generations yet unborn shall rise up to call her blessed.