. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very
suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
enemy's opinion.

3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
elsewhere, as the pressure upon