1. Germany had changed. The Germany which lost these provinces to Louis XIV was, as we have seen, a jumble of small states, loosely united under the ineffective headship of the Hapsburgs. The Germany which reclaimed them was a Hohenzollern empire from which much of the old empire, including the Hapsburgs, had been separated or excluded. 2. Alsace and Lorraine had changed. They had lost their German institutions and political sympathies and had become in all political respects French as the result of two centuries of membership in the French state, and especially of their share in the French Revolution. 3. European public opinion had changed through the growth of nationality, and was coming to regard peoples as entitled to determine their own destiny, or at least to be consulted regarding it. To tear away people from the country of which they formed a part in order to unite them with a state to which they had belonged two centuries before was becoming an anachronism. It is quite true, then, that Germany in 1871 was fighting Louis XIV, but in the spirit of Louis XIV rather than that of the later nineteenth century. Its appeal to history was in reality a denial of the facts of historic change, in that it asserted the predominance of the older historic tradition against the newer and more vital historic tradition created during the union of Alsace and Lorraine with France. Only a clear pronouncement of the inhabitants themselves in favor of such a transfer could justify it to the thinking of a later age. Yet a popular vote was neither permitted nor desired by Germany in 1871 or at any time between 1871 and 1918. In all such discussions of the affinities of Alsace and Lorraine, the outsider is struck with the failure of French and German to meet each other’s arguments. The truth seems to be that the disputants move in different realms of thought and feeling. To the Germans the German character of Alsace is accepted as self-evident, so that any connection with France appears unnatural and contrary to all national life. To the French the community of political and social ideas gained by long union with France seems the determining element, and subjection to Germany seems something monstrous.