The people were overwhelmingly German. A considerable directing element of capitalists, engineers, and officials had come from other parts of the empire, but the great majority were natives of the region. The mining population of 56,000 included surprisingly few foreigners or even Germans from a distance. Many had their cottages with a plot of ground about, going to and fro daily on workmen’s trains or returning home for the week-end. The ruling element was strongly Prussian, a part of the great administrative machine directed from Berlin. The regular local administration existed, but only as a part of the Rheinprovinz and of a Regierungsbezirk administered from Trier. The adjoining portions of the Palatinate were governed from Munich and Speier. The economic unity of the region had no corresponding political organization, as was admitted by German officials. The mass of the people were particularly interested in their labor organizations and in their rights under German labor legislation. If they had been consulted, they would doubtless have voted to remain with Germany. But it was at least debatable whether they had a right at the same time to vote to Germany the mines which she had taken in 1815 without consulting anybody. The control of key deposits of minerals by the small population which happens to live over them is not a necessary part of the principle of self-determination, particularly when this population forms part of a state which has been destroying the mines of others. The separation of mines from people may sometimes be governed by international considerations. The coal field of the Saar is the northern outcrop of a considerable deposit which extends in a southwesterly direction across Lorraine to the Moselle in the neighborhood of Pont-à-Mousson. Toward the southwest, however, the strata dip so deep as to be unworkable. The practicable part of the field is in the Saar valley, partly on the edge of annexed Lorraine, chiefly in Rhenish Prussia, with a small strip in the adjoining part of the Palatinate. The total output in 1913 was seventeen and a half million tons, of which two-thirds was mined between the frontiers of 1814 and 1815. It was understood, however, that production had been artificially restricted in the interest of the Westphalian field, and the proportion of the actual coal reserve was much greater. Any estimates of reserves are necessarily approximate, but in 1913 it was calculated that the Saar field contained seventeen billion tons, equal to 22% of the total German reserve, and more than the whole known supply of France, a country relatively poor in coal. No wonder the French found it hard to forget the loss of 1815! Moreover, all the mines in operation lay within a dozen miles of the new French frontier in Lorraine.