Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri La Fontaine

There is a lawyerly steeliness hiding in that mild phrasing: “Belgium thinks…” pretends to offer an opinion, but the sentence is really a demand dressed up as principle. La Fontaine frames “peril” as a known cost of the “system” being built, then treats that cost as morally secondary to obligation. The pivot is “ought to do its duty” - a compact, quasi-legal verdict that turns geopolitical risk into an ethical invoice.

The subtext is Belgium’s peculiar position in early 20th-century Europe: a small state with big ideas about rules. La Fontaine, a leading internationalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, helped push the notion that peace could be engineered through institutions, arbitration, and codified norms - the sort of “system” debated at The Hague and later embodied in the League of Nations. But for small countries, international law is never abstract. Belgium had already learned that neutrality on paper does not stop armies in practice; “peril” isn’t theoretical, it’s existential.

That’s why the line works rhetorically. It converts vulnerability into authority. Belgium can’t threaten, so it moralizes. It can’t guarantee security, so it insists on duty as the price of membership in a rules-based order. Underneath the upright tone sits a harder implication: if states flinch when the costs arrive, the entire project collapses into empty signatures and polite conferences. La Fontaine’s sentence is institutional idealism with a contingency plan: shame as enforcement.