While Germany has thus repeatedly shown her willingness and desire to
end the ancient feud, France has remained irreconcilable; and
particularly the intellectual class of France cannot escape the charge
that they have persistently and willfully kept alive the flame of
discord.
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.
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