THE British public is kept sufficiently well informed on Belgian affairs to understand the discontent prevailing in that country. Whatever reproach may be addressed to the Belgian Government it is not that of keeping the Allied nations in the dark. Three months ago the Belgian Prime Minister gave a genuine and frank statement on the situation. It amounted briefly to this. The country's industries were ruined and the State lacked credit to restore them; 800,000 workmen were kept in forced idleness and their families living on relief. The main activity of the country was thus completely paralyzed, and instead of reaping the benefit of a victory which she had bought so dearly, Belgium was hardly better off economically than when she was under German rule. We are told now that she will not sign the Peace Treaty unless she receives at least some securities allowing her to begin the heavy work of economic reconstitution. It seems a foregone conclusion. No democratic government would dare to act otherwise and to take the responsibility of sealing the fate of their people.

I have just come back from Belgium and had many opportunities of speaking with people belonging to all classes and parties and, what is more useful still, of watching them while they talked together. I was deeply struck by the change which had taken place since the armistice. The immense majority was then full of hope in the future and of gratitude to the

Allies. Four years of moral misery and physical privations had been wiped out as by the touch of a magic wand. If anybody expressed anxiety he was scornfully silenced. The hated 'Boches' had gone. The Belgians were now among powerful friends who had promised again and again to restore them to their full political and economic independence. nomic independence. Within a few weeks reconstruction would begin. The idle workers would rebuild their shops, trade would revive and the Antwerp docks would be filled with ships bringing raw material and foodstuffs and taking away the first products of Belgian industry. France as far as possible, but specially Great Britain and America, who had already given such splendid proofs of their kindness and generosity, would see to that. that. Belgium had made the great sacrifice; she had stood the ordeal for four years. Now was the time for reaping her reward.

Whether such hope was sensible, whether it was justified by the internal conditions of the great nations who had also stood the strain of a long and cruel struggle, does not matter for the present. The fact is that the Belgians, who had been cut off from the rest of the world, could not think otherwise than they did. All news which they had received during the war pointed to that conclusion. All the declarations of British, French, and American statesmen which had reached them through Allied propaganda confirmed them in that belief. Popular fancy saw King Albert play

ing a foremost part in the deliberations of the Peace Conference. Belgium, who had been the first victim of German aggression, would be the first to see her wounds healed. Her legitimate demands would be satisfied. Her interests would stand foremost in the deliberations of the Allied statesmen in 1919, just as her sacrifice stood foremost in the admiration of the Allied world in 1914. Had such illusions been even partly fulfilled in December last the people would have set to work to the last man to make up for lost time. No nation was more loyal to her government and to the Allied world than Belgium on the morrow of the armistice. Nowhere else was Bolshevism more remote from the mind of the people.

For several weeks this enthusiasm was kept up through rejoicings and festivities, the Allied troops receiving everywhere the most enthusiastic welcome. Then gradually the people realized that their position did not alter. Prices went down slightly, but life remained three or four times as expensive as it had been in pre-war times. War damage could not be paid, destroyed workshops remained empty, and while idling in the streets people began to ask themselves why they were kept destitute while their army was marking time on the Rhine. The government, of course, was first criticized, but Ministers had no difficulty in showing that they were paralyzed for lack of funds. Out of £100,000,000 so urgently required they had only received grants for £9,000,000 from England. From Paris also news was unsatisfactory. Belgium did not receive, according to public opinion, the representation she deserved; the discussion of her claims was postponed from month to month. She was placed on the same footing as other minor nations, some of whom had never

suffered through the war. She was treated 'as a poor relation.' A committee was sent to Brussels to take measures to feed the enemy, and some people bitterly remarked that if Belgium were to be threatened with Bolshevism she might receive closer attention. The chiefs of industry were not allowed to repay themselves in equivalent German machines, but were obliged to trace their stolen goods in the Vaterland, most of them giving up hope of ever being able to recover them. And the contrast between the prosperous industries of the Rhine country and the silent districts of Liege and Hainaut was insisted upon in every paper.

The financiers are now anxious owing to the enormous stock of unredeemed marks on the hands of the government and to the extraordinarily low exchange of the franc. The chiefs of industry clamor for machines and raw materials. The merchants complain that undue restrictions are put by Allied Governments on imports and exports, some neutrals receiving better treatment than Belgium, and the workmen, when by any chance work can be found for them, refuse to accept the pre-war wages, which have become totally inadequate. Local strikes have broken out even among government officials in order to obtain an increase of war bonus. And in spite of the patriotic attitude of the great majority of Socialists, Bolshevism, which was non-existent six months ago, is now rampant in more than one district.

With regard to the feeling toward the Allies, it is no use to blind one's self to the harm that has been done. 'King Albert,' it is said, 'who ought to be at the head of the Conference table, is now obliged to plead our cause.' The choice of Geneva was greeted with laughter. 'Of course, now that the war is over we are no longer of any

THE VICTORIAN GIRL

BY KATHARINE TYNAN

THE Victorian girl was a dear and delicate creature. You shall find her in the pages of Jane Austin and Mrs. Gaskell: in the illustrations of Miss Greenaway and Mr. Hugh Thomson of Lerch and Millais. She was at her very perfection circa 1840. She belonged to the great English middle class which overlaps at one end into the aristocracy. She must have begun to be after the French Revolution, for there was no stirring of wildness in her blood, or at least it was held in stern repression under a dove-like exterior. She was the direct descendant of the little ladies who in the eighteenth century were called Mrs. Prissy and Mrs. Pam. Her little heart was fluttered for the beautiful young men who wore side whiskers and tall bearskin busbies and went to the Peninsular War. That was the beginning of her, and she was as sweet and dainty and demure a thing as a lavender primula. Lavender was her color. Not yet had arrived the white muslin and blue ribbons of the later Victorian girl, an attire which stirred the romance in the heart of Victorian youth so that he thought of his goddess as so arrayed even in the depths of winter. The dear, delightsome Early Victorian Miss wore white muslin indeed - but with a tippet of fur and a beaver bonnet. Her eyes had the soft purple blue of the lavender she laid away between her muslins and her flowered silks. She had her little hands in a muff, and her frilled skirts barely reached her silkclad ankles. Her little shoes were not made for walking, and were held on her feet by crossed bands of elastic.

Of course she died in appalling numbers. She was dying through the eighteenth century. That age of the

a

memoirist gives us some poignant passages of the dying of dear youth. A little cough and a flare in the cheeks; sudden over-brightness of the lavender-blue eyes, and Miss was on the road from which not the Bath, nor the Wells, should save her. A group of little girls, frail as wind-flowers, stealing away into the shadows, haunts you as you close some of the sprightliest pages.

When they survived the muslin frocks and the sandals and all the rest of it they married in their early teens, produced a prodigious number of children, became wonderfully efficient housekeepers, and were adored by their men-folk. What power they had in the world they wielded through their men-folk. But with rare exceptions their influence hardly counted beyond the home circle. There were abominable cruelties. The sufferings of children in factories and mines, the terrible conditions of prisons and madhouses, the savagery of the law: none of these things reached the gentle, the adored creature.

She evolved as the Victorian days went on. The Queen herself was a pattern of the domestic virtues. She was the handmaid of her husband while keeping all the power in her own hands. Her court was clean and rigid almost to a fault. Few monarchs, one imagines, can have had so great an influence on their time as she. Her picture hung in English Victorian houses: her very presence might have been there so permeating was her influence.

Protestantism and Queen Victoria together hedged England round with artificial barriers. The mid- and laterVictorian girl was, I think, less charming than her predecessor, because despite the barriers she was restless. She was in process of evolution even if there were few signs of revolution. She lived at home: that was the sine qua

non; only one future was open to her, and of that she dreamed more perhaps than was good for her. She was treated in fact, as in fiction, as though she were a wax doll. She tended to have much less efficiency than her mother because she was growing dissatisfied. The natural girl in her made strange excursions under the unconscious eyes of her well-satisfied parents and guardians.

The fiction of those days neglected her as she neglected the fiction. Since she could not yet escape, but was stirring uneasily, her hero was the 'fast' man: in our days we should call him a man with a past. He began with Rochester and went on to Guy Livingstone and his fellows. That was one

aspect of him the strong man. In the other aspect you get him in Ouida and Miss Broughton. A few women's novels gave away the secret that the Victorian girl's ideal man was a scamp. I imagine Steerforth stirred her more than David Copperfield: and virtue as in Trollope's novels and Vanity Fair was dull. One or two women novelists again revealed the astounding psychological fact that a saintly woman could be drawn irresistibly by a blackguard, while virtue left her cold.

It was the fault of the swaddling bands in which women were enclosed.

ceptible stages. The emancipation of earning came to the women who had always been earned for by the male. When Tennyson wrote the Princess he put rose-colored blinkers on the fact that women were going out to earn their bread by teaching, and teaching efficiently, so efficiently, so that they must be trained for it. All through the Victorian era nursing, for which a woman is naturally fitted, was practically left to the women of the lower classes. Later than the seventies, much later, young ladies did poker-work and berlinwool work and crewel work to fill their empty hours. Good Heavens! What an occupation for women with souls.

The æsthetic movement, overlaid with absurdities as it was, threw these monstrosities into the dust-bin, and so perhaps sent the empty hands to looking for some better occupation. The bicycle was one of the keys of the new state. But perhaps after all it was the preponderance of the woman that forced woman out into the world. If the sexes had been equal, and if the war had not come the Georgian girl might yet have been sitting at home dreaming of the scamp who should be her mate.

The New Witness

BY THEODOR WOLFF

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This article, reprinted from the Berliner Tageblatt of May 1, is a review of Von Jagow's just published book Causes and Outbreak of the World War.]

From, roughly, about 1870, the revolution came by almost imper

HERR VON JAGOW was still on his honeymoon when Graf Hovos, July 5, 1914, appeared in Berlin with the letter of the Emperor Franz Josef, which announced great deeds. He returned the next day, and it cannot be certainly stated how far he participated