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Show ' L \\w.~u mu By SIR ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD A!aster of Peterhouse IT so happens that, more than three-quarters of a century ago, my father was personally much connected with the leaders of the movement that 'resulted in the recognition of Belgian independence and in the guarantee of Belgian neutrality by the European Great Powers. He remembered very well how, not long after the day had been won and King Albert's illustrious grandfather, King Leopold I, had mounted the throne on which he achieved so much for the prosperity of his own monarchy and for the peace of Europe at large, the King dismissed him after an audience with the words: "You know I am not without difficulties here; but I take England as my model, and try to get on in a constitutional way." In this spirit the Kings of the Belgians have ruled for three generations over a people that loves liberty, without throwing to the winds respect for au- thority in Church and State. But between the Belgians and ourselves there is something besides international obligations and political sympathy. These are the glorious tradi- tions of a history which in the course of many centuries has established between England and the Belgic lands a connection closer than that between her and any other part of continental Europe. The measure in which the inhabitants of this island are kith and kin with the neighbours of the Saxons and Frisians is a question that has long attracted students, but it is most assuredly a question of measure only. What is more to the purpose, the main industry of the great Flemish communes became in the later Middle Ages the chief customer of English pastoral productivity, and, besides leading to much immigration to these shores, became the basis of a cordial political alliance. Times changed with the decline of the mercantile and the downfall of the political greatness of the good towns; but the commercial relations between Great Britain and the Spanish (Austrian) Nether~ lands remained of vital interest to both countries, and formed an essential element in the system of alliances and conditions of treaties from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The debt owing to Belgian art and Belgian letters-to the labours of Belgian historians, I may venture to add, in particular-is one which this country shares with the world at large. But I cannot close without recalling how to the history of religion-an influence often united with that of trade and with that of politics, but working in more profound and mysterious fashion --and to the history of education, which is inseparable from it, Belgium has contributed in many ways, but above all in that of deepening these movements of soul and mind. The beginnings of Christian mystical thought and of the fraternities from which both Renaissance and Regeneration drew some of their truest spiritual force are in no small part traceable to the saintly influence of Ruysbroek, whose birthplace was not Vlar. from the modern Belgian capital. And the foremost representative of this learning and this teaching was a professor of the earliest and most venerable of those 81 |