The French language continued to be spoken in the family, notwithstanding all the governmental precautions to insure its disuse. Families continued to send their children to France to learn French, young girls particularly being placed in French boarding schools to complete their instruction and education. Up to that time commercial books had been published in French; bookkeeping was done in francs, even in those houses where the circumstances made it necessary to use the German language simultaneously. The condemnation of seditious utterances and the wearing of seditious emblems were no longer noticed and never ceased. The public has specially marked the case of conspicuous persons who have been implicated in prosecutions (the Samain brothers, Hausi and Zislin, the caricaturists, the Abbé Wétterlie), but alongside of these cases, thousands of obscure soldiers of the Alsace-Lorraine cause, victims of their attachment to France, have paid their tribute to their country. For shouting "_Vive la France!_", for singing of the _Marseillaise_, for showing a tri-colour ribbon, innumerable sentences, in some cases running into years of imprisonment, have been pronounced. When, in 1887, the situation in France, under the influence of the Boulanger movement, disclosed the possibility of a conflict at arms with Germany, the election of the Reichstag for that year resulted in sending to Berlin a protesting deputation, notwithstanding the tremendous governmental pressure put upon the electors. That was the signal for increased persecutions in Alsace-Lorraine. Student societies, singing classes, athletic associations, people suspected of cultivating French sympathies, newspapers showing French tendencies, all of these were suppressed and the members of the League of Patriots were betrayed and condemned for high treason. Bismarck introduced the régime of passports to cut off all relations between Alsace-Lorraine and France. The _Statthalter_ of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, at that moment governor of Alsace-Lorraine, has said in his _Mémoires_ that he had the impression that Bismarck wished to drive the population to insurrection. This plan fell through, thanks to the wisdom of the people who knew how to resist such a provocation. The result was simply to strengthen French patriotism. The rising generation which had gone through the German schools and German army fooled the German statesmen who had counted on them for the assimilation of German _Kultur_. On the contrary, these young people were most ardent in manifesting their devotion to France. Better prepared for the struggle than their elders, knowing the German language perfectly, familiarized by their studies with the Teuton dialects, they became most formidable adversaries. My comrade in combat, Jacques Preiss, killed during this war, a victim of German persecutions, has very well described the character and rôle of the youth in a discourse given in the Reichstag in 1894. He said: "We young fellows, we are not of the generation of 1870 whom choice and emigration have deprived of elements which are the firmest and most unresisting. If you do not introduce a more liberal régime, you will find by experience that this new generation is much more energetically opposed to fusion than has been the case since 1870."