To strike at one another they must strike Belgium.

By the accident of geography and the caprice of boundary lines she has always been the anvil for their hammers.

Jemmapes and Waterloo, to cite two especially conspicuous examples among great Continental battles, were fought on her soil.

Indeed, there is scarcely an inch of her for the possession of which men of breeds not her own--Austrians and Spaniards, Hanoverians and Hollanders, Englishmen and Prussians, Saxons and Frenchmen--have not contended.

These others won the victories or lost them, kept the spoils or gave them up; she wore the scars of the grudges when the grudges were settled.