Our eyes would have been turned at this moment with those of the whole
civilized world to Belgium, a small State, which has lived for more than
seventy years under the several and collective guarantee to which we in
common with Prussia and Austria were parties, and we should have seen at
the instance and by the action of two of these guaranteeing powers her
neutrality violated, her independence strangled, her territory made use
of as affording the easiest and the most convenient road to a war of
unprovoked aggression against France. We, the British people, would at
this moment have been standing by with folded arms and with such
countenance as we could command while this small and unprotected State,
in defense of her vital liberties, made a heroic stand against
overweening and overwhelming force; we should have been admiring as
detached spectators the siege of Liege, the steady and manful resistance
of a small army to the occupation of their capital, with its splendid
traditions and memories, the gradual forcing back of the patriotic
defenders of their native land to the ramparts of Antwerp, countless
outrages inflicted by buccaneering levies exacted from the unoffending
civil population, and, finally, the greatest crime committed against
civilization and culture since the Thirty Years' War, the sack of
Louvain, [cries of "Shame!"] with its buildings, its pictures, its
unique library, its unrivaled associations--a shameless holocaust of
irreparable treasures lit up by blind barbarian vengeance.
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