ng away passes the
holy Ark of the art and thought of centuries, borne on their shoulders.
The bearers can change. May the Ark be saved! To the elite of the world
falls the task of guarding it. And since the common treasure is
threatened, may they rise to protect it!

I am glad to think that in the Latin countries this sacred duty has
always been regarded as paramount. Our France which bleeds with so many
other wounds, has suffered nothing more cruel than the attack against
her Parthenon, the Cathedral of Rheims, "Our Lady of France." Letters
which I have received from sorely tried families, and from soldiers who
for two months have borne every hardship, show me (and I am proud of it
for them and for my people) that there was no burden heavier for them to
bear. It is because we put spirit above flesh. Very different is the
case of the German intellectuals, who, to my reproaches for the
sacrilegious acts of their devastating armies, have all replied with one
voice, "Perish every _chef-d'oeuvre_ rather than one German soldier!"

A piece of architecture like Rheims is much more than one life; it is a
people--whose centuries vibrate like a symphony in this organ of stone.
It is their memories of joy, of glory, and of grief; their meditations,
ironies, dreams. It is the tree of the race, whose roots plunge to the
profoundest depths of its soil, and whose branches stretch with a
sublime _elan_ towards the sky. It is still more: its beauty which soars
above the struggles of nations is the harmonious response made by the
human race to the riddle of the world--this light of the spirit more
necessary to souls than that of the sun.

Whoever destroys this work, murders more than a man; he murders the
purest soul of a race. His crime is inexpiable, and Dante would have it
punished with an eternal agony, eternally renewed. We who repudiate the
vindictive spirit of so cruel a genius, do not hold a people responsible
for the crimes of a few. The drama which unfolds itself before our eyes,
and whose almost certain _denouement_ will be the crushing of the German
hegemony, is enough for us.

What brings it home to us most nearly is that not one of those who
constitute the moral and intellectual elite of Germany--that hundred
noble spirits, and those thousands of brave hearts of which no great
nation was ever destitute--not one really suspects the crimes of his
Government; the atrocities committed in Flanders, in the north and in
the e