To one who approaches the matter without any nationalistic prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been determined, not by any geographic necessity, but by the vicissitudes of history. France has no such clearly marked frontier on the northeast as it possesses in other directions, for the Rhine, like other rivers, unites more than it divides, while a mountain range like the Vosges, strongly recommended by German writers in the region of Alsace, fails as we proceed northward. As a matter of history, whatever value the Rhine frontier possessed in Roman days disappeared with the Germanic invasions, and ever since the partitions of the Frankish empire in the ninth century the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse have been debated between France and Germany. There is no racial frontier, for the region is one of mixed Teutonic and Alpine types, whose distribution was more affected by highland and valley than by any considerations of east and west. There is a linguistic frontier, which has scarcely changed in the open country since the early Middle Ages, and French and German speech have naturally been the vehicles of their respective civilizations; but the linguistic and the political frontiers have rarely coincided, and “the linguistic frontier has never determined the political.”[31] The decisive considerations have been political pressure and military force, and in the more recent period political affinities and economic relations. At first Germany had the advantage, if we mean by Germany that loose congeries of tribal duchies and later of feudal principalities which made up the mediaeval Empire. Thus the partition of Meersen (870), which you will seek in vain in the text of Freeman’s _Geography_ or in Schrader’s _Atlas historique_, is often cited by German scholars as fixing a permanent line of demarcation to Germany’s advantage, and was even invoked by Brockdorff-Rantzau in May 1919 as the original basis of the German title to the Saar valley. Yet this same line would give to France Maestricht, Liège, and the mouths of the Rhine! After the disintegration of the Empire in the later Middle Ages, French advance began actively in the sixteenth century in the region of the Three Bishoprics. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV intrenched himself on the Saar at Saarlouis, and piece by piece gained possession of Alsace. The Revolution carried the tricolor down the Rhine from Landau to the Dutch border. Then came the treaty of Vienna, setting France back to the limits of 1789 and even farther, and the treaty of Frankfort by which France lost all contact with the Rhine. The victory of 1918 again put France on the Rhine. A German medal of 1917 represents an exhausted France driven to her death by England at Verdun, while on the obverse under the insignia of peace the German Rhine flows calmly on--“und ruhig fliesst der Rhein.” The French flag now floats not only over Verdun but over Metz and Strasburg as well. The Rhine still flows on