This formidable coalition of the three greatest European powers, threatening the very existence of Germany, has now been joined by Japan, openly and boldly for the purpose of snatching from Germany her one Asiatic possession.
If any additional proof had been needed to make it clear that, if Germany wanted to retain the slightest chance of extricating herself from this worldwide conspiracy against her, she had to strike the first blow, even at the risk of offending against international good manners, this stab in the back by Japan would furnish such proof.
Although I hate to enter into a controversy with Prof. Kuno Francke, who was once my excellent friend, I cannot refrain from answering his article which appeared in last Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES.
How can any one say, in all fairness, that Germany's policy toward France during the last forty-three years has been one of the utmost restraint and forbearance, and has been dictated by the one desire to make her forget the loss of the two provinces? What are the facts? We know that not once, but again and again, since 1878, Germany has tried to provoke France into war. We know that on one occasion Queen Victoria herself threatened the Kaiser with Great Britain's intervention if he did not desist from his intended attack on France. And to cite only the two most recent instances, the Agadir affair and the enforced resignation of the French Premier, Delcassé! Would Germany have swallowed such insults?
This may be the German conception of "utmost restraint and forbearance," but it appeared to the French, as it did to the rest of the world, that it required their utmost restraint and forbearance to remain calm under the affronts.
The fact that Alsace-Lorraine was German up to the seventeenth century, and inhabited by German stock, cannot be brought forward today, after more than 200 years, to justify the retaking of those provinces by the Germans. The whole world would be in a state of continual warfare if nations claimed provinces or States that belonged to them once upon a time. Richelieu's idea was that the Rhine was the natural and geographical frontier between France and Germany, and the war was undertaken to carry out that plan. Since then the inhabitants have become French, and the attempts to re-Germanize them have proved futile. Prof. Francke may well doubt if the acquisition of these provinces was a fortunate thing for Germany. It was undoubtedly the most unfortunate thing not only for Germany but for France and the rest of Europe, for it kept open a wound which might have been healed either by a return of the lost provinces, with or without compensation, or by granting them autonomy, or, better still, by leaving it to the inhabitants to choose for themselves, as France did with Nice and Savoy.