THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, AUGUST 31, 1914. LOUVAIN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15701, 31 August 1914, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, AUGUST 31, 1914. LOUVAIN.

' A week ago Louvain was a city of I about the population of Dunedin, inhabited by a peaceable, inoffensive, and industrious people; enriched by the slow and patient accumulation of public and private possessions; begemmed with irreplacable architectural treasures; a Mecca for artists, and the admired of new-world travellers, who wondered at its beauties, and returned home inspired by its civic spirit to a higher and nobler sense of the meaning of civilisation. To-day Louvain is a heap of ruins; its 45,000 citizens are homeless dependents upon the charity of their Belgian kinsfolk; its wonderful churches, its great public buildings," its pictures, its statuary, its every relic of centuries bygone, have been destroyed; its homes are no more; its smoke witnesses to all the world against the German- There has been no more monstrous crime committed in the world, for unresisting Lcnvain has been depopulated and destroyed by an enemy that professes to be Christian and civilised, the sole pur- j pose of its destruction being to terrorise the Belgian people into: abject submission to a wicked in-1

vasion. It may be that some will find, or fabricate, excuse and justification for this last proof of the pirate-spirit that animates Germany, | and will ask us to consider that every country invites such destruc-' tion of its cities arid such treatment of its civilian population when it 1 dares to resist tyranny and to main- 1 tain its integrity. Free peoples the : world over will have no dealings ' with such subterfuges. The wilful burning of Louvain will kindle the fire of righteous indignation in every British heart, and will harden its determination to pursue the struggle with Germany until the power of that viciously-militant nation to oppress the weak and to trample on the innocent is gone for ever. Germany has hoisted the black flag of international piracy. Until that black flag is torn down there can be no good faith among the nations and no safety for liberty in the world.

When those who judged Germany by her displays of utter unscrupul ousness in the past warned their "British fellow-countrymen of the character of the great military and naval Power which civilisation was permitting to grow up in its midst, they were denounced by well-mean-ing people who foolishly imagined that Germany had the same code as other civilised states. During the past month it has b*.en abundantly proved that Germany has no honour and no code. There is something pitiable in the mental attitude of the German Chancellor who could not understand why the British Ambassador thought it natural that the British Government should dare to fight for "only a scrap of paper." To attack a weak neutral without the slightest provocation, and for no other reason than that it was convenient to traverse this neutral territory, seemed tire most ordinary thing to this educated German statesman and has apparently seemed quite natural to the Germans themselves; that Prussia itself had guaranteed Belgian neutrality counted with them so little that thoy could not possibly understand why a similar guarantee should count with Britain at all. To set mines adrift at sea, in defiance of their agreements, was natural to this perverted German mind the moment his ships were swept from the seas; no matter how many neutrals suffered he was content if he could injure his enemy. To drop bombs on an invested city, fire on the Red Cross, to use the Red Cross as cover, were but further steps in the swift descent of the German Army to the pit of dishonour. To terrorise the Belgian, to avoid the necessity for guarding transport lines, the German authorities considered it desirable to commit some monstrous act of blood-curdling brutality; the result we have in tho destruction of Louvain. The Kaiser and his Ministers, the commanders and.the army, the nation and the individuals that can do these things— against their written agreements, the laws of nations, and the' dictates of humanity—arc no more fit to have power than a criminal lunatic is to have a deadly weapon. The burning of Louvain, following upon terrible scones of pillage, murder, and expulsion, will have an effect which its perpetrators did not expect and may never understand. Soldiers, maddened by excitement, i have done wicked things of which their commanders have been ashamed and their countrymen resentful, but I German authority was responsible! for this crime and German officialism justifies it. It therefore stands before men as a national iniquity, I and can never be forgiven to the' Government which avows it as apart of its military methods. There can be no peace with such a state as Germany has become, and no tolerance for those who would save it from the impotence to which it is doomed and which it deserves. No nation really great and really strong could have done as Germany has constantly and consistently done since she threw aside the mask—l trampled upon the weak, become in-1 j ternational traitor, forfeited her honi our, and outraged every law. This 1 ' ' . 1

is the. temper of a bandit-state brought to bay, of a piratical-Gov-ernment fighting with the rope round its neck, of a barbaric organisation whose only hope lies in repeating the short-lived triumphs of Attila and the ravaging raids of Ghcngis Khan. A Belgian mission is said to have left for the United States in order to bring before Mr. Wilson German violations of international law, but it is not by the American Government that the Kaiser and his myriads will be brought low. Germany will fall because although her methods may terrorise the weak, the unprotected, and the defencele : they only nerve and strengthen men with weapons and nations that are still free. No British Home-bred or colonial-will fear to meet the burners of Louvain, and no British sailor will feel timid when he sees before him those who have sown mines broadcast on the high seas. We may be sure that in the reported cruiser action the German sowing of mines steadied the matchless aim of our British gunners and filled the sowers themselves with fear; and that in their every desperate retreating or advancing—our British regiments thought of Germany's treachery and of Britain's loyalty and struck all (ho harder for the right. And what can we think of a GovernI ment, a nation, and an army which does not understand this, which ; imagines, in 1914, that it can win to ! the Kaiserdom of Europe and the , mastery of the world, by such crimes | as the burning of Louvain ?