The internal history of this half-century of German rule is a most interesting chapter, which we must pass over in order to gain time for an analysis of the question about which that history revolved. Taken as a whole, the period must be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the rulers to assimilate by force an unwilling population. The German government had great resources on its side--compulsory education on the German model and in the German tongue, the repressive measures of the greatest army and the strongest administrative system in Europe, the influx of immigrants from beyond the Rhine, the development of communication with the other parts of the empire, an extraordinary material prosperity in which the Reichsland shared. Its policy alternated between harsh repression and clumsy efforts to win the people’s good will. There were periods when it seemed to be making headway, by the mere lapse of time and the apparent hopelessness of resistance, if by nothing else; the argument from prosperity had its effects; the protesting leaders turned toward more immediate measures of amelioration within the empire. Then an episode like the Zabern affair of 1913 would occur to show that the country was still governed by military force, and the pro-French feeling would blaze out again. The relative strength of the French and German parties was a subject of acrimonious and inconclusive debate. The fact remained that there was a large French party, just how large nobody knew, which maintained a vigorous tradition of French speech and sympathies, by the fireside, among the clergy, in intercourse with France itself. Its existence was shown in the midst of the war by a project brought before the Reichstag for colonizing Alsace-Lorraine with ‘reliable’ subjects. The survival of this French party through fifty years of persecution is one of the finest public examples of the triumph of the inner over the outer life. A peasant who was waving an old French flag at Strasburg at the great reception to the French troops in November 1918 was asked how he had obtained it. “My father,” he said, “in 1871 put this under a plank of his barn, and every Sunday of his life he knelt over it in prayer for the return of Alsace to France. When he died, he handed on the charge to me to keep until that day should come.” The two elements in the population are well illustrated at Metz, where a German-speaking majority of soldiers, officials, and tradesmen came in, and a new quarter sprang up about the railroad station in the latest and heaviest style of neo-German architecture, but the old French town still remained, with its narrow streets, its mediaeval gates (especially that great eastern portal called the ‘German Gate’), its hôtel de ville, and its Gothic cathedral. And the three ages of Metz may be typified by this French cathedral of the thirteenth century, with the statue of William II as a prophet filling a niche in one of its portals, and the