It surely cannot be said that the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine is a vital necessity to France.  Without Alsace-Lorraine France has recovered her prosperity and her prestige in a manner that has been the admiration of the world.  It is a mere illusion to think that the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine would add to her glory.  It would have been a demand of patriotism for the intellectual class to combat this illusion.  Instead of this, every French writer, every French scholar, every French orator, except the Socialists, year in and year out, has been dinning into the popular ear the one word revenge.

France to Blame.

There can be little doubt that Prof.  Gustave Lanson, the distinguished literary historian, voiced the sentiments of the vast majority of his countrymen when in a lecture, delivered some years ago at Harvard, he stated that France could not and would not reorganize the peace of Frankfurt as a final settlement, and that the one aim of the French policy of the last forty years had been to force Germany to reopen the Alsace-Lorraine question.

If there were people in Germany inclined to overlook or to minimize this constantly growing menace from France, their eyes must have been opened when in 1912 the French Government, having previously abolished the one-year volunteers, raised the duration of active military service for every Frenchman from two years to three, and, in addition to this, called out in the Autumn of 1913 the recruits not only of the year whose turn had come, namely, the recruits born in 1892, but also those born in 1893.  This was a measure nearly identical with mobilization; it was a measure which clearly showed that France would not delay much longer striking the deadly blow.  For no nation could possibly stand for any length of time this terrific strain of holding under the colors its entire male population from the twentieth to the twenty-fourth year.  No wonder that the Paris papers were speaking as long ago as the Summer of 1912 of the regiments stationed in the Eastern Departments as the “vanguard of our glorious army,” and were advocating double pay for them, as being practically in contact with the enemy.

The second foe now threatening the destruction of Germany is England.  Can it truly be said that England’s hostility has been brought about by German aggression?  True, Germany has built a powerful navy; but so have Japan, the United States, France, and even Italy.  Has England felt any menace from these?  Why, then, is the German Navy singled out as a specially sinister threat to England?  Has German diplomacy during the last generation been particularly menacing to England?  Germany has acquired some colonies in Africa and in the Far East.  But what are Kamerun and Dar-es-Salaam and Kiao-Chau compared with the colonial possessions of the other great powers?  Where has Germany pursued a colonial aggressiveness that could in any way be compared with the British subjugation of the South African republics or the Italian conquest of Tripoli or the French expansion in Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco, or the American acquisition of the Philippines?