"The strategic dispositions of Germany, especially as regards railways,
have for some years given rise to the apprehension that Germany would
attack France through Belgium."

The disposition of the Third, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh
Germany Army Corps and the First, Fourth, and Fifth Cavalry Divisions,
from Aug. 2 to 5, shown on French war maps, reveals that the attack was
so made.]

If, according to jurisprudence, the planning to commit crime is legally
on a par with its achievement, then Germany, for five years prior to the
war, had been guilty of violating Belgium's neutrality--guilty in such a
manner as to leave no doubt in the minds of Belgian, French, and English
statesmen and military experts that the actual commission of the crime
would some day take place.

It was Belgium's peculiar duty, as will be seen, to prepare for that
day. To have taken Germany into her confidence on a point on which
Germany was already fully informed would very likely have hastened the
day and the tragedy thereof.

In keeping up her forts facing Germany and building none on the French
frontier, in exchanging ideas with English military experts as to how
best her neutrality could be defended, Belgium was preparing for the
inevitable. This inevitableness is no longer a matter of moral
conjecture. It is a matter of material evidence.

First, let us see what it was that Germany violated. Belgium, partly by
a decree of the Vienna Congress in 1815 and partly by revolution,
secured her independence from the Netherlands in 1830. The next year she
inaugurated her Constitution, and by the Treaty of London, signed Nov.
15, 1831, became the god-child, as it were, of Austria, France, Great
Britain, Prussia, and Russia, who guaranteed her neutrality for all time
in the following manner:

_Article 7--Belgium, within the limits specified in Articles 1, 2, and
4, shall form an independent and perpetually neutral State. She shall be
bound to observe this same neutrality toward all other States._

_Article 26--Consequent upon the stipulation of the present treaty there
shall be peace and unity between H.M. the King of the Belgians, on one
part, and H.M. the Emperor of Austria, the King of the French, the King
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the King of Prussia,
and the Emperor of all the Russians, on the other, respectively,
forever._

The treaty, however, was not at once put into force, for there was a
pending quarr