To argue that the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine is not a vital necessity to France; that without these provinces she has recovered her prosperity and her prestige, and that it is mere illusion to think that the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine would add to her glory is pure sophistry.  It is just as if you said to a man whom you had robbed of some valuable property:  “What does it matter?  You are just as well off without it.”  Yes, Prof.  Larson did voice the sentiment of the vast majority of his countrymen when he stated that France could not and would not recognize the treaty of Frankfurt.  If I have an enemy who takes me by surprise and with revolver leveled at my head compels me to sign a paper by which I despoil myself to his advantage, what is the validity of such a document?

That is the way that all Frenchmen of all classes look upon the treaty of Frankfurt, wrung from them under duress.

The term “revanche” is a slogan.  It simply typifies in one word the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine; but it does not carry with it the idea of willfully laying waste the enemy’s country, burning and pillaging, shooting inoffensive non-combatants, and cleaning banks of all the gold they contain.

Another statement which is misleading in Prof.  Francke’s article is the one which refers to the “growing menace from France,” in which he speaks of the increasing armament that has been going on in that country since 1912.  But what is called in Germany “the menace from France” is called in the latter country “the menace from Germany.”  Who started these enormous armaments?  Each time Germany increased her army France was forced to do the same; and when France recently increased from two to three years the duration of military service, it was her only way of meeting Germany’s increase of 500,000 men.

The attempt to change the roles and present France to the world as the aggressor, or even as premeditating an attack upon Germany, is futile.  It is a strange and yet not uncommon psychological fact that the hate of the conqueror is often greater than that of the conquered; and it is German, not French, hate which has forced Germany into this savage war.  France had recovered too rapidly from her disasters; she was too rich; her colonies were too vast and too prosperous; she must be crushed.  What right had she to have large colonies when Germany, the superior nation, had none worth mentioning?  There you have the key to the Kaiser’s repeated provocations and to his final attack.

In regard to England and Russia, the writer will simply confine himself to the statement that if the German Imperial Government can produce as clean a bill of health as the “White Paper” of the British Foreign Office, just published, it will do more to convince American public opinion of the justice of its cause than anything that has yet been written in the press by Germans and their sympathizers.

R.L.  SANDERSON.