lem of psychology rather than of logic or ethics. It strongly
illustrates a too familiar phenomenon that great intellectual and
moral astigmatism is generally incident to any passionate crisis in
human history. It shows how pitifully unstable the human intellect is
when a great man like Dr. Haeckel, a scholar and historian like Dr.
von Mach, or a doctor of divinity like Dr. Dryander, can be so warped
with the passions of the hour as to ignore the clearest considerations
of political morality.

At the outbreak of the present war Belgium had taken no part whatever
in the controversy and was apparently on friendly relations with all
the Powers. It had no interest whatever in the Servian question. A
thrifty, prosperous people, inhabiting the most densely populated
country of Europe, and resting secure in the solemn promises, not
merely of Germany, but of the leading European nations that its
neutrality should be respected, it calmly pursued the even tenor of
its way, and was as unmindful of the disaster, which was so suddenly
to befall it, as the people of Pompeii were on the morning of the
great eruption when they thronged the theatre in the pursuit of
pleasure and disregarded the ominous curling of the smoke from the
crater of Vesuvius.

On April 19, 1839, Belgium and Holland signed a treaty which provided
that "Belgium forms an independent state of perpetual neutrality." To
insure that neutrality, Prussia, France, Great Britain, Austria, and
Russia on the same date signed a treaty, by which it was provided that
these nations jointly "became the guarantors" of such "perpetual
neutrality."

In his recent article on the war, George Bernard Shaw, who is
inimitable as a farceur but not quite convincing as a jurist, says:

As all treaties are valid only _rebus sic stantibus_, and
the state of things which existed at the date of the Treaty
of London (1839) had changed so much since then ... that in
1870 Gladstone could not depend on it, and resorted to a
special temporary treaty not now in force, the technical
validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful.

Unfortunately for this contention, the Treaty of 1870, to which Mr.
Shaw refers, provided for its own expiration after twelve months and
then added:

And on the expiration of that time the independence and
neutrality of Belgium will, so far as the high contracting
parties are respectively concerned, continue to rest as