e thought with which I came away:
"Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been
the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the
world."

After King Leopold's death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding
facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court--of
the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes
to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with
certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them;
of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediately
preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documents
of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the
intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man's body
to share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of his
end, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save for
one scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was,
whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partly
false, of shame, greed, lust, and life-long duplicity! And all this dark
tale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of open
Court, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world how
contemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies of
mankind.

But the war and King Albert's part in it saved Belgium from that
unmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroic
young sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by the
side of our own king's soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic of
France, has sustained the highest traditions of kingship. He may have
lost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but he
has won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tent
is pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. He
may be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom of
souls.

"WHY SHOULDN'T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?"

The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of the
drama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the war
with the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely than
the tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy.
Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeat
there is al