mur, Ypres. For my part I should like to recall something of what Belgium was in peace, and what she did give or was in train of giving to the triumphs of civilisation.
One does not need to say anything of her treasury of art; her painters from Van Eyck to the enigmatic madness of Wierbz; her incomparable belfries, hôtels de ville and halles, testifying still to the richest municipal life of the middle ages; her cathedrals; of Bruges of the three hundred bridges—one of which the present writer has cause to remember as he was all but drowned under it—of the Castle of Bouillon, from which Godefroid went to the Holy Land to capture Jerusalem and to refuse to wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns. Nor is there need to say anything of the ambiguous splendour of such places as Ostend, in summer a Paradise at once of children and of those no longer conspicuously childlike. Nor again, of the remote beauty and clean winds of the Ardennes. It is of the life that the Belgian nation, working on its environment, had made for itself in three generations of guaranteed peace, that I like, on this anniversary, to recall some sort of inadequate picture.
Belgium was the most thickly peopled state in Europe. In the Meuse valley, from Liége to Seraing, she possessed the most extensive manufacturing area of its size in the world, surpassing Lancashire and Massachusetts. She had a greater
