The Art of Public Speaking
buy goods from other countries, and she has the property to export to
foreign lands. Last year the United States, with its hundred millions of
people, imported less than $2,000,000,000, and exported $2,500,000,000.
If our people had been as prosperous per capita as Belgium, we would
have purchased from other countries $12,000,000,000 worth of goods and
exported $10,000,000,000.
So largely have we been dependent upon Belgium that many of the engines
used in digging the Panama Canal came from the Cockerill works that
produce two thousands of these engines every year in Liege. It is often
said that the Belgians have the best courts in existence. The Supreme
Court of Little Belgium has but one Justice. Without waiting for an
appeal, just as soon as a decision has been reached by a lower Court,
while the matters are still fresh in mind and all the witnesses and
facts readily obtainable, this Supreme Justice reviews all the
objections raised on either side and without a motion from anyone passes
on the decision of the inferior court. On the other hand, the lower
courts are open to an immediate settlement of disputes between the wage
earners, and newsboys and fishermen are almost daily seen going to the
judge for a decision regarding a dispute over five or ten cents. When
the judge has cross-questioned both sides, without the presence of
attorneys, or the necessity of serving a process, or raising a dollar
and a quarter, as here, the poorest of the poor have their wrongs
righted. It is said that not one decision out of one hundred is
appealed, thus calling for the existence of an attorney.
To all other institutions organized in the interest of the wage earner
has been added the national savings bank system, that makes loans to men
of small means, that enables the farmer and the working man to buy a
little garden and build a house, while at the same time insuring the
working man against accident and sickness. Belgium is a poor man's
country, it has been said, because institutions have been administered
in the interest of the men of small affairs.
THE GREAT BELGIUM PLAIN IN HISTORY
But the institutions of Belgium and the industrial prosperity of her
people alone are not equal to the explanation of her unique heroism.
Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Caesar said that Gaul was inhabited
by three tribes, the Belgae, the Aquitani, the Celts, "of whom the Belgae
were the bravest." History will show that Belgians have courage as their
native right, for only the brave could have survived. The southeastern
part of Belgium is a series of rock plains, and if these plains have
been her good fortune in times of peace, they have furnished the
battlefields of Western Europe for two thousand years. Northern France
and Western Germany are rough, jagged and wooded, but the Belgian plains
were ideal battlefields. For this reason the generals of Germany and of
France have usually met and struggled for the mastery on these wide
Belgian plains. On one of these grounds Julius Caesar won the first
battle that is recorded. Then came King Clovis and the French, with
their campaigns; toward these plains also the Saracens were hurrying
when assaulted by Charles Martel. On the Belgian plains the Dutch
burghers and the Spanish armies, led by Bloody Alva, fought out their
battle. Hither, too, came Napoleon, and the great mound of Waterloo is
the monument to the Duke of Wellington's victory. It was to the Belgian
plains, also, that the German general, last August, rushed his troops.
Every college and every city searches for some level spot of land where
the contest between opposing teams may be held, and for more than two
thousand years the Belgian plain has been the scene of the great battles
between the warring nations of Western Europe.
Now, out of all these collisions there has come a hardy race, inured to
peril, rich in fortitude, loyalty, patience, thrift, self-reliance and
persevering faith. For five hundred years the Belgian children and youth
have been brought up upon the deeds of noble renown, achieved by their
ancestors. If Julius Caesar were here today he would wear Belgium's
bravery like a bright sword, girded to his thigh. And when this brave
little people, with a standing army of forty-two thousand men,
single-handed defied two millions of Germans, it tells us that Ajax has
come back once more to defy the god of lightnings.
A THRILLING CHAPTER FROM BELGIUM'S HISTORY
Perhaps one or two chapters torn from the pages of Belgium history will
enable us to understand her present-day heroism, just as one golden
bough plucked from the forest will explain the richness of the autumn.
You remember that Venice was once the financial center of the world.
Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put
their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of
the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and
twenty feet high. Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World
turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and
Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal. No captains
were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp. In 1568 there were
500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse. Belgium became a casket
filled with jewels. Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes
northward. Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and passion,
the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son,
King Philip. Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva,
with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition. Their
approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy
with commerce and not with war. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards
makes up a revolting page in history. Within three days 8,000 men, women
and children were massacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine
and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were. The
Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to
blackened ruins. One incident will make the event stand out. When the
Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his
son's marriage. During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of
the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man's house. When they
had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they
killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the
night. The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found
in the street, searching among the dead bodies. At last she found a
youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her
songs, as a young mother soothes her babe. A Spanish officer passing by,
humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put
the girl out of her misery.
THE HORRORS OF THE INQUISITION
Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set
up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a
strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations
have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruelty to the
Moors and the rich Jews forms one of the blackest chapters in history.
Inquisitors became fiends. Moors were starved, tortured, burned, flung
in wells, Jewish bankers had their tongues thrust through little iron
rings; then the end of the tongue was seared that it might swell, and
the banker was led by a string in the ring through the streets of the
city. The women and the children were put on rafts that were pushed out
into the Mediterranean Sea. When the swollen corpses drifted ashore, the
plague broke out, and when that black plague spread over Spain it seemed
like the justice of outraged nature. The expulsion of the Moors was one
of the deadliest blows ever struck at science, commerce, art and
literature. The historian tracks Spain across the continents by a trail
of blood. Wherever Spain's hand has fallen it has paralyzed. From the
days of Cortez, wherever her captains have given a pledge, the tongue
that spake has been mildewed with lies and treachery. The wildest beasts
are not in the jungle; man is the lion that rends, man is the leopard
that tears, man's hate is the serpent that poisons, and the Spaniard
entered Belgium to turn a garden into a wilderness. Within one year,
1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000.
Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many
thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers
and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno,
whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown
the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield
up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms,
she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the
merchant into the deadly embrace. As the iron arms concealed in velvet
folded together, one spike passed through each eye, another through the
mouth, another through the heart. The Painted Lady's lips were poisoned,
so that a kiss was fatal. The dungeon whose sides were forced together
by screws, so that each day the victim saw his cell growing less and
less, and knew that soon he would be crushed to death, was another
instrument of torture. Literally thousands of innocent men and women
were burned alive in the market place.
There is no more piteous tragedy in history than the story of the
decline and ruin of this superbly prosperous, literary and artistic
country, and yet out of the ashes came new courage. Burned, broken, the
Belgians and the Dutch were not beaten. Pushed at last into Holland,
where they united their fortunes with the Dutch, they cut the dykes of
Holland, and let in the ocean, and clinging to the dykes with their
finger tips, fought their way back to the land; but no sooner had the
last of the Spaniards gone than out of their rags and poverty they
founded a university as a monument to the providence of God in
delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. For, the Sixteenth
Century, in the form of a brave knight, wears little Belgium and Holland
like a red rose upon his heart.
THE DEATH OF EGMONT
But some of you will say that the Belgian people must have been rebels
and guilty of some excess, and that had they remained quiescent, and not
fomented treason, that no such fate could have overtaken them at the
hands of Spain. Very well. I will take a youth who, at the beginning,
believed in Charles the Fifth, a man who was as true to his ideals as
the needle to the pole. One day the "Bloody Council" decreed the death
of Egmont and Horn. Immediately afterward, the Duke of Alva sent an
invitation to Egmont to be the guest of honor at a banquet in his own
house. A servant from the palace that night delivered to the Count a
slip of paper, containing a warning to take the fleetest horse and flee
the city, and from that moment not to eat or sleep without pistols at
his hand. To all this Egmont responded that no monster ever lived who
could, with an invitation of hospitality, trick a patriot. Like a brave
man, the Count went to the Duke's palace. He found the guests assembled,
but when he had handed his hat and cloak to the servant, Alva gave a
sign, and from behind the curtains came Spanish musqueteers, who
demanded his sword. For instead of a banquet hall, the Count was taken
to a cellar, fitted up as a dungeon. Already Egmont had all but died for
his country. He had used his ships, his trade, his gold, for righting
the people's wrongs. He was a man of a large family--a wife and eleven
children--and people loved him as to idolatry. But Alva was inexorable.