The problem of how to approach this task, gentlemen, will now primarily concern you.  What should be the form of our immediate procedure? for it should surely not bind us irrevocably for all the future.  I would ask you not to deliberate as if you were to create something that will hold good for eternity.  Do not endeavor to form a definite idea of the future as you may think it should be after the lapse of several decades.  No man’s foresight, I hold, can reach as far as that.  The conditions are abnormal; they had to be so—­our entire task was so—­not only as regards the mode of taking possession of Alsace, but also as regards the present owners.  An alliance of sovereign princes and free cities making a conquest which it is compelled to keep for its own protection, and which is, therefore, held in joint possession, is very rare in history.  It is in fact, I believe, unique, if we disregard a few ventures by some Swiss cantons, which after all did not intend to assimilate the countries which they had jointly conquered, but rather to manage them as common provinces in the interest of the conquerors.  Considering, therefore, the abnormal conditions and our abnormal task, we are most especially called upon to guard against overestimating the perspicacity in human affairs of even the most far sighted politicians.  I for one do not feel capable of foretelling with certainty what the conditions in Alsace-Lorraine will be three years hence.  To do this one would need an eye capable of piercing the future.  Everything depends on factors whose development, conduct, and good will are beyond our power of regulation.  What we are proposing to you is merely an attempt to find the right beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience with the conditions of the future.  Let me ask you, therefore, to follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish they should be.  If one has nothing better to put in the place of something that one does not entirely like, one had better, I believe, let matters take their own course, and rest satisfied at first with conditions as they are.  As a matter of fact the allied governments have jointly taken these countries, while their common possession and common administration, although constituting an established premise, may be modified in future by our own necessities and the needs of the people of Alsace and Lorraine.  As regards the definite form which the proposition may take some day, I sincerely urge you to follow the lead of the governments and to defer your judgment.  If you are bolder than we are in prejudging what will happen, we shall gladly meet your wishes, since we must work together.  The caution with which I have announced to you the convictions of the allied governments, and with which these governments have formed their convictions, is an indication to you of our willingness to be set right, if you should offer us a better plan, especially if experience—­even a short experience—­should have proved it to be a better plan.