The great gainer by the new arrangements was Prussia. Before the Revolution her only possessions on the Left Bank, namely Cleves, Mörs, and Prussian Guelders, were on the lower Rhine. At Vienna, as a compensation for the Saxony which was refused her, she was given the greater part of the Left Bank, her territory now reaching from the valley of the Saar to the Dutch border. For the first time Prussia and France were neighbors. However German these lands may have been, they had never been Prussian, and the bargain by which they were handed over to Prussia took no account of past history or the desires of the population. If the Paris Conference was to undo the historic wrongs perpetrated at Vienna, it could well begin here. A wrong a hundred years old, however, is not easily undone, and its undoing may constitute an even greater wrong. Particularist at the outset, the Rhineland had been assimilated by Prussia and by the new German empire, partly through the agencies of government and administration, still more perhaps through its participation in the great economic development of modern Germany. It had become the seat of world industries: iron and steel mills, sugar refineries, textile manufactories, and chemical plants. It was served by an excellent railroad system, and by the shipping of the Rhine and its tributaries. Its rapidly growing cities lay on both banks of the river. It was in the closest connection with Westphalia, Prussia’s other great industrial province. Since 1815 the population of the Rheinprovinz had quadrupled, until it was one of the most densely peopled regions of Europe. Under Prussia it had prospered and waxed fat, and prosperity had reconciled differences. Then, if the Rhineland was to be taken from Prussia, to whom could it be given? No one wanted to return to the feudal lords, lay or spiritual, of the old regime and the simple life. Could the land go back to France?