though this thought
were not of those which can live in that atmosphere purified by
misfortune. They are not resigned, for to be resigned means to
renounce the strife, no longer to keep up one's courage. They are
proud and happy in their distress. They have a vague feeling that this
distress will regenerate them after the manner of a baptism of faith
and glory and ennoble them for all time in the remembrance of men. An
unexpected breath, coming from the secret reserves of the human race
and from the summits of the human heart, has suddenly passed over
their lives and given them a single soul, formed of the same heroic
substance as that of their great king.

3

They have done what had never before been done; and it is to be hoped
for the happiness of mankind that no nation will ever again be called
upon for a like sacrifice. But this wonderful example will not be
lost, even though there be no longer any occasion to imitate it. At a
time when the universal conscience seemed about to bend under the
weight of long prosperity and selfish materialism, suddenly it raised
by several degrees what we may term the political morality of the
world and lifted it all at once to a height which it had not yet
reached and from which it will never again be able to descend, for
there are actions so glorious, actions which fill so great a place in
our memory, that they found a sort of new religion and definitely fix
the limits of the human conscience and of human loyalty and courage.

They have really, as I have already said and as history will one day
establish with greater eloquence and authority than mine, they have
really saved Latin civilization. They had stood for centuries at the
junction of two powerful and hostile forms of culture. They had to
choose and they did not hesitate. Their choice was all the more
significant, all the more instructive, inasmuch as none was so well
qualified as they to choose with a full knowledge of what they were
doing. You are all aware that more than half of Belgium is of Teutonic
stock. She was therefore, thanks to her racial affinities, better able
than any other to understand the culture that was being offered her,
together with the imputation of dishonour which it included. She
understood it so well that she rejected it with an outbreak of horror
and disgust unparalleled in violence, spontaneous, unanimous and
irresistible, thus pronouncing a verdict from which there was no
appeal and giving t