Though forced to live several generations under French rule, it must be observed that the people of Alsace-Lorraine never ceased to be Germans. The proper mother tongue of a people is that in which it prays. The most distinguished Catholic pulpit orator of Alsace in the last century, Abbe Muhe, who died in 1865, was able only once in his life to bring himself to preach in French; and Canon Gazeau, of Strasburg Cathedral, published in 1868 an “Essai sur la conversation de la langue Allemagne en Alsace,” in which, in the interest of religion and morals, he energetically resisted the attempt to extirpate German speech. The population of Alsace, with the exception of the rich and comfortable, in its thoughts, words and feeling was thoroughly German. In a petition which was addressed in 1869 to the Emperor Napoleon by people of German Lorraine, we read as follows: “O, sir! How many fathers and mothers of families who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow impose upon themselves the pious but none the less heavy duty of teaching their children the catechism in German by abridging in the winter evenings their own needful hours of sleep.” In 1869 a radical journal was established by prominent republicans of Muhlhausen in the interest of propagating agitation against the French empire among the laboring people. This paper appeared only in the German language, and justified this course in the following words: “Because the majority, yes, the very large majority, of the Alsatian people is German in thought, in feeling, in speech; receives its religious instruction in German; loves and lives according to German usages, and will not forget the German language.” The boundary established in 1871 was the true national and racial boundary, which had been destroyed by Louis XIV when Germany, after the Thirty Years War, was too weak to defend it, but which remained the boundary in the hearts of those on both sides until the French Revolution, when executions, deportations and process of ruthless extermination finally broke the spirit of resistance in the population and made it succumb in order to save itself from extinction. The attempt of the French to control the Rhine regions, though continued for centuries, has been a failure. “To one who has been through the documents,” writes Raymond D. B. Cahill, in “The Nation” for July 26, 1919, “an astounding thing is the French picture of their former experience in ruling the Rhinelands. The student of that period sees little which should encourage the French to attempt a repetition of that experiment. Indeed, he is impressed with the futility of the nation’s attempt to absorb a people of quite different culture. Although dealing with a people still unawakened by German patriotism, the French found eighteenth century Rhinelanders so different, so attached to their own customs and religion, that it took many years to overcome their resistance.”