rights this would really sanction an international wrong. Some even maintained that, the treaty of Frankfort having been torn up by Germany in 1914, Alsace and Lorraine therewith reverted to France, _ipso facto_ disannexed. To accept a plebiscite as the basis of restoration was to admit the lawfulness of the act of violence by which they had been seized. These arguments were hard to answer save on the ground of a strongly expressed demand on the part of the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and, whatever their opinion, no such general demand was forthcoming. Certainly Germany’s record of oppression and failure as a ruler was sufficient to forfeit whatever claims she might justly have had upon the Reichsland, and she had formally accepted President Wilson’s demand that “the wrong done to France in 1871 should be righted.” That wrong consisted, not in failing to hold a plebiscite, but in contemptuously disregarding the unmistakable expressions of popular opinion then and thereafter expressed. French Socialist opinion still wanted a plebiscite, but the purpose was plainly to satisfy a theoretical scruple, which required a popular vote for any change of sovereignty. For good or ill, Alsace-Lorraine came back to France without a popular consultation; it was administered by France in the interval between the armistice and the treaty of peace; and the treaty recognized French sovereignty as beginning with the armistice, November 11, 1918. The deed of Frankfort was thus undone. A plebiscite seemed impracticable, unless as a mere matter of form, and in that case it was unnecessary. There was something to be said for summoning a popular assembly for other purposes which might easily have expressed the opinion of the people, but this again would have been chiefly a matter of form, to forestall future objections. * * * * * So the fundamental provisions of the treaty which concern Alsace-Lorraine consist merely of a preamble by which the high contracting parties, Germany thus included, recognize “the moral obligation to redress the wrong done by Germany in 1871 both to the rights of France and to the wishes of the population of Alsace and Lorraine,” and the article[29] restoring to France the territories ceded by the treaty of Frankfort. The other articles[30] are, essentially, consequences and applications of this act of restoration. Some of them merely reproduce, in the opposite sense, clauses of the treaty of 1871. In general, however, the Paris articles are fuller and more complicated, partly because they had to be adapted, either by reference or by way of exception, to the other provisions of the instrument in which they are contained, partly because the restoration of territory after half a century necessarily raises questions not involved in the original cession.