Nay, worse, your rulers have always known it perfectly well, but refused to see it or to admit it, because they wanted office and knew that to say the truth would bring the radical vote in the cities upon their poor heads.

It is the old hypocrisy, in the sense in which Germans have always accused your nation: alas! and it is half my nation too.

You pride yourselves on "Keeping your word" to Belgium.

But you pride yourselves also, not so overtly just now, on always refusing to prepare yourselves to keep that word in _deed_.

In the first days of August you knew, absolutely and beyond all doubt, that you could do nothing to make good your word.