to think of Switzerland where three languages are spoken; not even interests in common, for these exist in every society, but just the living together of two centuries shared with the great nation of France has made Alsace-Lorraine French."

But Ziegler and his friends have forgotten that to live together there must be mutual understanding and esteem. History teaches that no appreciable advantage is to be gained unless the peoples agree, or if one nation tries to impose its brutal domination over another. And yet it is just this which is the great obstacle that prevents Germany from assimilating Alsace-Lorraine and has condemned all its efforts to eternal failure.

INCOMPATIBILITY OF DISPOSITION OF THE GERMANS AND THE INHABITANTS OF ALSACE-LORRAINE

In his excellent volume, The Peril of Prussianism, Professor Douglas W. Johnson has traced, in a masterly fashion, the difference between the two ideals of government, one starting with the principle that the State is made to serve the people, the other, that the people are made to serve the State, a view personified by the Kaiser in Germany today.

The Alsaces-Lorraines have always had great independence of character; they are thoroughly democratic and republican, for which reason they so quickly and solidly became a part of the French nation, which, even under different forms of monarchical government, respected their liberty and democratic ideals.

The political history of Alsace-Lorraine furnishes a new proof of this fact on every page. Lorraine became a part of France at the Convention of Friedwald in Hessen, January 14, 1552, when the German Protestant princes at war with the Catholic House of Austria, gave Metz, Toul, and Verdun to the King of France, Henry II., in exchange for subsidies furnished by France.

In the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Alsace was ceded to France in exchange for services which the King gave to the German Protestant princes fighting against the Catholic Empire. Alsace was conquered for France by the German Prince, Bernard de Saxe-Weimar, on the demand and in the interest of Germany which had called upon France for help. Strasbourg, which had remained a free independent city, opened her gates to France in 1681. The Republic of Mulhouse, which made a part of Helvetia, asked, and obtained the request, to be incorporated into France in 1798. Neither Alsace nor Lorraine ever made part of the German Empire founded in 1871, and to which vanquished France was obliged to give up these territories. When these two provinces came into the possession of France, they were bound by rather loose ties to the Holy Roman Empire, of which the House of Austria was at the head. The Austria-Hungary Empire did not survive the Napoleonic wars, and I do not know that it ever claimed any part of Alsace-Lorraine.

On the contrary, in order to found the German Empire and appropriate Alsace-Lorraine, Prussia had to make war on Austria in 1866 to put her out of Germany. The German Empire is wrong, therefore, in making an appeal to anything but force to explain, if not to justify the spoliation of France. Alsace-Lorraine was never a political entity before 1871. We have seen that Alsace was still a part of the Holy Roman Empire, while Lorraine had already belonged to France for a hundred years.

Alsace, alone, had never been a state. This is how the learned professor of the University of Caen, Georges Weil, describes in his remarkable book, French Alsace from 1789 to 1871, the period after the reunion of Alsace with France: "It was a strange mosaic of different freeholds, of principalities both lay and ecclesiastical, of free cities or those almost autonomous. Among these freeholds many belonged to German princes. A sixth part of Alsace was owned by foreigners." The Emperor's authority had been only nominal. On his visits, which were few and far between, he was received with courtesy, money was freely given to him, but the people always rejoiced when they saw him leave. The Alsatians received but little assistance from the Empire; Alsace secured no help when menaced or invaded by foreign armies. The ten ancient cities flourished under an almost autonomous rule. Even before the reunion with France, cultivated society was filled with the French spirit. After the Thirty Years' War, the country felt the benefit of the protection of a powerful State with a well-ordered government which respected its habits and customs and which administered justice. So their sympathies were quickly given to their new political country with which, by reason of their democratic ideals, they were already politically in sympathy. That which rapidly attached the people to the new régime was, on the one hand, the friendly and intelligent interest of the royal intendants who protected the subjects from arbitrary lords and other local authorities, and on the other hand, the sovereign Council of Alsace, sitting at Colmar, which was to simplify, and, if possible, to unify, the customs that were in force in different parts of the country and also insure a sound administration of justice. The success was complete. A German, François d'Ichterscheim, was obliged to acknowledge, in a work published in 1710, that the Sovereign Council "rules with strict justice, law-suits are not too lengthy, expenses are not too heavy, and above all, no favour is shown to either litigant, the subject often winning his suit against the sovereign,—the poor against the rich, the layman against the clergy, the Christian against the Jew, and vice-versa."

The people were contented and satisfied. The Alsatian has always had a pronounced taste for the military career. Many young peasants enlisted in French regiments and were well received. The nobility furnished a number of officers to the French army. Alsatian gentlemen enjoyed taking part in the gay social life of the French aristocracy. Alsatian scholars kept in constant touch with Paris, where they received every encouragement and were much appreciated. It is not astonishing then, that Monsieur Schmettan, Ambassador of Russia to the King of France, should write in 1709: "It is well-known that the Alsatians are more French than the Parisians themselves."

The holding in common of the same ideas and feelings was even more accentuated at the time of the Revolution, and no part of France was better prepared by her past history for the coming of a rule of Democracy and Equality. In 1787, Alsace was called upon for the first time to elect a Provincial Assembly which would represent the interests of a large number of domains, princely seignorial, and municipal, the commission chosen to make a report to the Assembly declared: "That which tends to feudalism carries a mark of servitude not to be tolerated in a well-constituted society." In the elections for the États Généraux, the little bourgeoisie won in all the cities against the oligarchy which desired to retain the control. Reubell, who played an important rôle in the Revolution, and who was a member of the Directory, was elected at Colmar. The peasants hailed with enthusiasm the decree of August 4, 1789, which marked the end of the feudal régime. The suppression of the custom-house duties between Alsace and the rest of France sealed the economic union between the new and the old countries so that the creation of the departments of the Upper and the Lower Rhine was effected without any difficulty.

After the proclamation of the equality of the French people, the right to levy on the feudal rents in France, which the German princes who owned property in Alsace had exercised, could no longer exist. The Germans