that no oppression
has half the dangers of an obvious reform. At Ypres the
Reformers were first in the field. They had swept through
Flanders, destroying all the beauty and wealth that the piety of
ages had accumulated, and here was rich plunder for these
apostles of the ugly. There is real tragedy in the thought that the
Reformer is sometimes sincere.

But at least the fanatics limited their fury to the symbols of
religion. Philip of Spain could only be sated by flesh and blood,
and for the next fifteen years Ypres was tossed to and fro in an
orgy of persecution and war such as have rarely been waged
even in the name of religion. At the end of that time only a
miserable five thousand inhabitants remained within its broken
ramparts.

With the seventeenth century commerce and religion made way
for politics, and the wars of Louis XIV. fell heavily on Ypres. On
four separate occasions the town was taken by the French, and
the dismantled fortifications which still surround it were once an
example of the genius of Vauban. Yet with all these wars--
commercial, religious, political--with all the violence of its
history, Ypres had kept intact the glorious monuments of the
days of her greatness, and it has been left for the armies of
Culture to destroy that which even the hand of Philip spared.

The centuries have handed down to us few buildings of such
massive grandeur as the great Cloth Hall, a monument of the
days when the Weavers of Ypres treated on equal terms with
the Powers of England and of France. This huge fortress of the
Guilds is about a hundred and fifty yards long. The ground floor
was once an open loggia, but the spaces between its fifty pillars
have been filled in. Above this are two rows of pointed windows,
each exactly above an opening below. In the upper row every
second window has been formed into a niche for the figure of
some celebrity in the history of the town. A delicate turret rises
at each end of the facade, and above it rose the high-pitched
roof which was one of the most beautiful features of the
building. In the centre is the great square tower, reaching to a
height of more than two hundred feet, and ending in an elegant
belfry, which rises between its four graceful turrets. The whole
of this pile was finished in 1304; but in the seventeenth century
there was added at its eastern end the Nieuwerck, an exquisite
Renaissance structure supported entirely on a row of slim
columns, with tiers of