This participation in the life and ideals of France continued until 1871. There was, it is true, a considerable feeling of particularism in Alsace, and to a lesser extent in Lorraine, as well as some natural sympathy between the Protestant minority in Alsace and the Protestants beyond the Rhine; but there was no movement for separation from France and no desire manifested therefor. Toward 1870 the desire for the recovery of these ‘lost provinces’ became more pronounced in Germany, and it was fanned into flame as the war of 1870 progressed; but this nationalistic movement found little or no response among the Alsatians whom it claimed as long-lost kinsmen. If they were still German “socially and ethically,” “politically and nationally they were thoroughly French.” They were Germans as members of the family, Frenchmen as members of the nation.[21] The Germans freely admitted in 1871 that the Alsatians did not yet desire reunion with Germany, but this was laid to their French education, and time and experience of the blessings of German rule were expected to work a rapid change in their desires. The state of opinion in Alsace at the time of the Franco-Prussian war is excellently shown by an outside observer, Sir Robert Morier, then British secretary of legation at Darmstadt, whence he had opportunity to follow closely the events of the war and the course of German opinion. Strongly pro-German and anti-French throughout, he made it his business to inquire from the best German sources whether there was any party in Alsace which desired annexation to Germany, and the answer was uniformly in the negative. Among others he interrogated the Grand Duke of Baden, who had led an army in Alsace, and “had given himself the greatest trouble to ascertain the feeling of the population in regard to Germany and ... had come to the conclusion that not only no annexationist party existed, but that the strongest possible national French feeling pervaded the whole population.”[22] The usual German justification of the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine may be summed up in the words of the historian Ranke in 1870, “We are fighting Louis XIV.” These provinces had been taken from Germany in the seventeenth century; they must now be taken back by their rightful owner. To many people this is still the essence of the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. Now if the world had not moved in the interval between Louis XIV and 1871, there would be little to say in answer to this argument. In the seventeenth century lands and peoples were passed from one sovereign to another like pieces on a chessboard, and what had been lost in one game might well be retaken in the next. But as regards this question the world had changed in three important respects:--