The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1915. FURTHER HELP FOR THE BELGIANS.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 September 1915, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1915. FURTHER HELP FOR THE BELGIANS.

It is said that Time is the healer of all trouble, but in the ease of Belgium it will take centuries to efface the things of shameless shame that have been done —things that arc worse than prodigies, worse than nightmares, worse than devilries; they are facts. In the course of a soul-stirring appeal which has just reached us from Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Buckinghamshire, he points out that the efforts already made have done much to avert a famine, but if the million ana u half destitute Belgians are to be kept alive, the National Committee, which has already accomplished so mucli in ameliorating the dreadful sufferings of the brave Belgians, mjist have further support. There arc countless cases for compassion among the bewildering and heartrending by-products of this war, but the case of Belgium is not one for compassion. It partakes rather of that sense of honor which inipclls us to repay a poor man who has advanced his last penny to post a letter we have forgotten to stamp. The Belgian did not merely suffer and die for Belgium, hut for Europe. Not only was the soldier sacrificed for the nation; the nation was sacrificed for mankind—a sacrifice that is probably unique even among Christians, and quite inconceivable among pagans. Mr. Chesterton says:

''There have been stories of a woman or a child actually robbed of reason for life by the mere ocular shock of some revolting cruelty done in their presence. There was really a danger of something of the kind paralysing our protest against the largest and, by the help of God, the last of the crimes of the Prussian Kings. The onlookers might have been struck into a sort of gibbering imbecility and even amiability, by the full and indefensible finality of the foul stroke. We had 110 machines that could measure the stunning directness or thß blow from hell. We could hardly realise an enormous public act which the actor did not wish to excuse, but only to execute. Yet such an act was the occupation of Belgium; almost the only act ill history for which there was quite simply and literally nothing to be said. Bad history is the whole basis of Prussia: but even in bad history the Prussians could find no precedent and 110 palliation: and the more intelligent 'Prussians did not try."

There is no need to talk of exaggeration or wis:'aoi'e.9entfttions in connection with the harms vozuniitUd in Belgium. Tliey

bave been vouched for again and again, and the people are still suffering bitterly for tlieir unique sacrifice iu stemming the onivard march of the ruthless soldiers of the Kaiser bent on a victory that woujil have been akin to that of the beats over mankind. To visualise what happened iu Bclguni when the Prussian hordes violated the neutrality they were pledged to maintain, we > have to imagine a pre-historic cruelty coming suddenly upon a scene that was civilised and almost commonplace, and even then we should fall short of this fearful Belgan scene. It is for these victims of the ferocious Huns that a further appeal is made. f'lf," says our correspondent, "there be anyone who does feel that to be caught napping about Belgium is like being caught robbing one's mother on her deathbed; there still remains a sort of brutal compassion for bodily pain, which has been halfadmitted hero and there even by the oppressors themselves. If we do not do a great deal more even than we have already done, it may yet be said of us that we left it to the very butchers of this nation to see that it did not bleed to death."