after the operation.

And this brings me to a subject on which I feel very strongly, the folly
of removing bullets. If a bullet is doing any harm, pressing on some
nerve, interfering with a joint, or in any way causing pain or
inconvenience, by all means let it be removed, though even then it
should in most cases never be touched until the wound is completely
healed. But the mere presence of a bullet inside the body will of itself
do no harm at all. The old idea that it will cause infection died long
ago. It may have brought infection with it; but the removal of the bullet
will not remove the infection, but rather in most cases make it fire up.
We now know that, provided they are clean, we can introduce steel
plates, silver wires, silver nets, into the body without causing any
trouble at all, and a bullet is no worse than any of these. It is a matter
in which the public are very largely to blame, for they consider that
unless the bullet has been removed the surgeon has not done his job.
Unless he has some specific reason for it, I know that the surgeon
who removes a bullet does not know his work. It may be the mark of a
Scotch ancestry, but if I ever get a bullet in my own anatomy, I shall
keep it.

IV. Antwerp

There is no port in Europe which holds such a dominant position as
Antwerp, and there is none whose history has involved such amazing
changes of fortune. In the middle of the sixteenth century she was the
foremost city in Europe, at its close she was ruined. For two hundred
years she lay prostrate under the blighting influence of Spain and
Austria, and throttled by the commercial jealousy of England and
Holland. A few weeks ago she was the foremost port on the
Continent, the third in the world; now her wharves stand idle, and she
herself is a prisoner in the hands of the enemy. Who can tell what the
next turn of the wheel will bring?

Placed centrally between north and south, on a deep and wide river,
Antwerp is the natural outlet of Central Europe towards the West, and
it is no wonder that four hundred years ago she gathered to herself
the commerce of the Netherlands, in which Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent
had been her forerunners. For fifty years she was the Queen of the
North, and the centre of a vast ocean trade with England, France,
Spain, Portugal, and Italy, till the religious bigotry of Philip II of
Spain and the awful scenes of the Spanish Fury reduced her to
ruin. For two hundred years the