The German wrong done to France in 1870 was at the same time a supreme political blunder. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace-Lorraine had been French for nearly two hundred years and was strongly French in sentiment. There was no real case for restitution to Germany on geographical or historical grounds. For generations life in the border provinces touching the Rhine had been in a state of flux. The rigid territorial demarcations of our own time were then non-existent. Frontiers and population were both fluid. Baedeker, whose national bias in matters both of art and history makes the Handbook on Germany often very unreliable, writes of the “seizing” of Strasbourg by Louis XIV. and the “restoration” of the city after 1870. Cities and provinces, according to our modern ideas, were tossed about ruthlessly in the seventeenth century, but Alsace-Lorraine having become thoroughly French had no wish to find itself restored to the Fatherland and brought within the circle of Prussian philanthropic effort. Even Alsace, more predominantly German in origin than Lorraine, had in 1870 no desire for other allegiance but that of France. The provinces were torn, protesting and unhappy, from the motherland of their adoption. Bismarck, great and unscrupulous genius, whose clear-sighted vision in matters of practical statecraft was only equalled by his entire lack of moral sense, knew that a bad mistake had been made. “I do not like the idea of so many Frenchmen being in our house against their will,” he remarked uneasily. But Bismarck, whose time and thoughts had been devoted with devilish ingenuity and success to manœuvering France into war and putting her in the wrong over the process, had at the critical point, so it would seem, not sufficient energy left to resist the annexationist clamour of the Prussian generals. He yielded to military pressure, thus leaving an open sore in the side of Europe, which in the end was to involve his own creation of the new-made German Empire in ruin. To-day the provinces are French again, while the conscience of the world applauds a righteous act of restitution. It would be foolish, however, to deny that the return of Alsace-Lorraine after forty-seven years of German rule, with a German population very largely increased, does not present an administrative problem to France of exceptional difficulty. Lorraine, as I have said elsewhere, has kept its French character very much intact throughout the years of oppression. The problem of Alsace is harder to solve.