Yet when, on Aug. 2, a mighty foreign power, confident in its own
strength and defiant of the faith of treaties, dared to threaten us in
our independence, then did all Belgians, without difference of party, or
of condition, or of origin, rise up as one man, close ranged about their
own King and their own Government, and cry to the invader: "Thou shalt
not go through!"
At once, instantly, we were conscious of our own patriotism. For down
within us all is something deeper than personal interests, than personal
kinships, than party feeling, and this is the need and the will to
devote ourselves to that more general interest which Rome termed the
public thing, _Res publica_. And this profound will within us is
patriotism.
Our country is not a mere concourse of persons or of families inhabiting
the same soil, having among themselves relations more or less intimate,
of business, of neighborhood, of a community of memories happy or
unhappy.
Not so; it is an association of living souls subject to a social
organization, to be defended and safeguarded at all costs, even the cost
of blood, under the leadership of those presiding over its fortunes. And
it is because of this general spirit that the people of a country live a
common life in the present, through the past, through the aspirations,
the hopes, the confidence in a life to come, which they share together.
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