However this may be, Germany has done her best during the last four decades to heal the wounds struck by her to French national pride. She abetted French colonial expansion in Cochin-China, Madagascar, Tunis. She yielded to France her own well-founded claims to political influence in Morocco. In Alsace-Lorraine itself she introduced an amount of local self-government and home rule such as England has not accorded even now to Ireland. While Ireland still is waiting for a Parliament at Dublin, Strassburg has been for years the seat of the Alsace-Lorraine Diet, a provincial Parliament based on universal suffrage. And even in spite of the incessant and inflammatory French propaganda which last year led to such unhappy counter-strokes as the deplorable Zabern affair, there can be no reasonable doubt that the people of Alsace-Lorraine have been gradually settling down to willing co-operation with the German administration--an administration which insures them order, justice, and prosperity. Nothing is a clearer indication of the peaceable trend which affairs have lately taken in Alsace-Lorraine than the fact that the Nationalists, i.e., French party, in the Strassburg Diet has never been able to rise above insignificance, and that, on the other hand, a considerable number of responsible officers in the civil administration, including the highest Governmental positions, have been occupied by native Alsatians. While Germany has thus repeatedly shown her willingness and desire to end the ancient feud, France has remained irreconcilable; and particularly the intellectual class of France cannot escape the charge that they have persistently and willfully kept alive the flame of discord. It surely cannot be said that the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine is a vital necessity to France. Without Alsace-Lorraine France has recovered her prosperity and her prestige in a manner that has been the admiration of the world. It is a mere illusion to think that the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine would add to her glory. It would have been a demand of patriotism for the intellectual class to combat this illusion. Instead of this, every French writer, every French scholar, every French orator, except the Socialists, year in and year out, has been dinning into the popular ear the one word revenge. France to Blame. There can be little doubt that Prof. Gustave Lanson, the distinguished literary historian, voiced the sentiments of the vast majority of his countrymen when in a lecture, delivered some years ago at Harvard, he stated that France could not and would not reorganize the peace of Frankfurt as a final settlement, and that the one aim of the French policy of the last forty years had been to force Germany to reopen the Alsace-Lorraine question.