Alsace-Lorraine Originally German.

As to Alsace-Lorraine, the facts are known to be that it had belonged to Germany until it had been taken, against the will of the people, by France under Louis XIV., and it was returned to Germany as a matter of right, more than three-quarters of the population being of German descent and speaking the German language.

But let me ask in return, Mr. Eliot, when did ever in her political career England consult the will of the people when she took a country?  Can he say that, when England tore the treaty of Majuba Hill, like a “scrap of paper,” and made war on the Boers?  Did she consult the people of Cyprus in 1878?  Does he know of any plebiscite in India?  Has she consulted the Persians, or has France consulted the people of Morocco, or of Indo-China, Italy the people of Tripoli?  Since Germany has not acted here in any other way forty years ago than all the other nations, why does Dr. Eliot consider the American people justified in taking anti-German views for reasons of such an old date, while he forgives the nations of the party he favors for much more recent infringement of his rule?

“Americans object to the violation of treaties.”  So do the Germans.  We have always kept our treaties, and mean to do so in the future.  The fact with Belgium is that her neutrality was very one-sided; that, as can be proved, as early as the 25th of June, Liege was full of French soldiers, that Belgian fortifications were all directed against Germany, and that for years past it was the Belgian press that outdid the French press in attacks against Germany.  But I can give Mr. Eliot here some authority that he has so far not challenged.  When Sir Edward Grey presented the English case in the House of Commons on the 3d of August he declared that the British attitude was laid down by the British Government in 1870, and he verbally cited Mr. Gladstone’s speech, in which he said he could not subscribe to the assertion that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee was binding on every party, irrespective altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises.  He called that assertion a “stringent and impracticable” view of the guarantee and the whole treaty a “complicated question.”  So Mr. Gladstone, and with him Sir Edward Grey, has held the Belgian neutrality treaty not binding on every party, when it was against the interest which the particular situation dictated, when the war broke out.  It was the interest of Great Britain to maintain the treaty, and that is why she acted.  It was against German interest to maintain the treaty, and that is why she broke it.  That is the British and not the German theory, and I could very well rest my case here.  My theory is with the German Chancellor, that I greatly regret the necessity of violating the Belgian neutrality, after Belgium had chosen to repel the German overtures for a free passage.