With the press muzzled and the severe censorship of letters, it will be only after the war that we shall have exact knowledge of what Alsace-Lorraine has passed through during this dreadful period. But what we are certain of at present is that the attitude of the people is the same now as in the past. The Alsatians, faithful in their devotion to France, await with a patriotic impatience, but with an unshaken faith in the victory of their holy cause, their deliverance from the German yoke. Deputy Preiss, already quoted, was able to say to the Reichstag, June 30, 1896: "The assimilation, the germanization has not taken a single step forward.... It is terror that governs and poisons our political life. The government does not understand the people and the people do not understand the government.... History will say, The German Empire was able to conquer Alsace-Lorraine materially, but was not able to conquer her morally; she has not known how to win the heart and the soul of the people." Is it not like a paraphrase of the celebrated verse so often sung all through the country: "Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine Et malgré vous nous resterons Français! Vous avez pu germaniser la plaine, Mais notre coeur, vous ne l'aurez jamais!" "Alsace-Lorraine ne'er will you own, In spite of you, Frenchmen are we, Others may serve with a curse and a groan, But ever our hearts shall be free!"? The situation has never changed. This is what one could read a short time before the war in a book of Professor Forster's of Munich in a study on the failure of German policy in the frontier provinces: "Alsace, a country of arch-German origin, forty years after her return to Germany, has still to an astonishing degree French sympathies, or at least it has no German sympathies. After more than forty years, we have not been able to re-Germanize this population." Let us finish by another German testimony. This is how, from the _Matin_, July 18, 1917, the _Kieler Zeitung_ expresses itself on the results of the germanization of Alsace-Lorraine: "The wise conservatives thought that thanks to the reunion under the established rule of the Empire, they could reconcile two provinces different from each other, and having in common only an arrogant defiance of the ambitions of the Empire." This confidence was an ignominious mistake. Lorraine bound itself solidly and stubbornly to French congenial ideas, vigorously developed in her in a large measure by the mother tongue; while, as to Alsace, she was like the twig of a German bough strayed away from its ethnic tree and rotted to the core by French climate. They can be reclaimed neither by benevolence nor by force.