The quarrel between Germany and France is a very old story. It did not start, as many people imagine carelessly, in 1870. Long before that date a barrier of bitter memories had already been piled up between the two countries. Germany too has had her grievances, heavy grievances, in the past against France. Louis XIV. carried fire and sword through the Rhineland and Palatinate during the wars of the Spanish Succession. His generals left an imperishable memory of outrage. The Napoleonic occupation laid a hand of iron subsequently on the German people. Read the poets of the Liberation period, Arndt, Rückert, Körner, Schenkendorf, and realise how deep that iron bit into the soul of the nation. Travel among the Rhineland towns and study their history. It is one long record of French occupation and destruction either in the seventeenth or early nineteenth century--Mainz, the cathedral used as a magazine and barracks; Cologne, horses stabled in the cathedral nave; Speyer, town and cathedral ravaged with fire and sword by the generals of Louis XIV., ruffians who exhumed and scattered to the winds the bones of eight German emperors; Worms, reduced in 1689 to a smouldering heap of ruins; Aachen, Bonn, Coblenz, Baden, all with bitter memories of military conquest and occupation. If I draw attention to these old unhappy far-off things it is not from any desire to rake gratuitously among painful memories of the past. But the German attitude towards France can never be understood unless due weight is given to these black and bitter pages in their earlier relations. France must face candidly the historical truth that Prussian militarism came into being as a reply to the aggressions first of Louis XIV., then of Napoleon. The sins of older generations of French rulers have been visited on innocent heads, but the sins were there. The memory of French tyranny in former years was the driving force which welded the German states together. To the average German 1870 appeared the vindication of his national honour, the signal proof that the humiliations of the Napoleonic period were wiped out. Once again the old coil of evil is seen unfolding itself in a monotonous succession of wrongs done and revenge exacted, the revenge creating new wrongs which in turn lead to further strife. Are we prepared to weave yet further sequences of this disastrous character? Or shall the spirit of man rise up and say the coil must be broken?