WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS—COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND—SOME MEMORIES
It is an irony characteristic of this scurvy and disastrous time that Belgium should have first found her way to the general imagination of these countries through the waste redness of war. Peace was her whole being. For eighty years, trusting to the good faith of Europe, she had pursued an economical evolution without parallel. For national defence she had relied on that most solemn treaty of the nineteenth century. Even a little time ago, even since Agadir, her army, although unsuspectedly alert in technique, was still a jest of vaudeville. In temper and fibre, the Belgian people was the least militarist on the Continent. It is true that in recent years, wise foreseeing men of arms and men of politics, troubled by the audacity of Prussian apostles of conquest like Bernhardi, had begun to take alarm. Brialmont, the great engineer, had fortified Liége against Germany, and improved the defences of Namur against France. He had also, of course, planned the new entrenched position of Antwerp, the war-*capital, and incidentally provided us with the
