e. We must, therefore, not permit ourselves
to believe that the goal is in sight, and that Alsace will soon be as
intensely German in feeling as Thuringia. On the other hand, we need
not give up the hope of living to see the realization of our plans
provided we fulfill the time generally allotted to man.

The problem of how to approach this task, gentlemen, will now
primarily concern you. What should be the form of our immediate
procedure? for it should surely not bind us irrevocably for all the
future. I would ask you not to deliberate as if you were to create
something that will hold good for eternity. Do not endeavor to form a
definite idea of the future as you may think it should be after the
lapse of several decades. No man's foresight, I hold, can reach as far
as that. The conditions are abnormal; they had to be so--our entire
task was so--not only as regards the mode of taking possession of
Alsace, but also as regards the present owners. An alliance of
sovereign princes and free cities making a conquest which it is
compelled to keep for its own protection, and which is, therefore,
held in joint possession, is very rare in history. It is in fact, I
believe, unique, if we disregard a few ventures by some Swiss cantons,
which after all did not intend to assimilate the countries which they
had jointly conquered, but rather to manage them as common provinces
in the interest of the conquerors. Considering, therefore, the
abnormal conditions and our abnormal task, we are most especially
called upon to guard against overestimating the perspicacity in human
affairs of even the most far sighted politicians. I for one do not
feel capable of foretelling with certainty what the conditions in
Alsace-Lorraine will be three years hence. To do this one would need
an eye capable of piercing the future. Everything depends on factors
whose development, conduct, and good will are beyond our power of
regulation. What we are proposing to you is merely an attempt to find
the right beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only
when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience
with the conditions of the future. Let me ask you, therefore, to
follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have
followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish
they should be. If one has nothing better to put in the place of
something that one does not entirely like, one had better, I believe,
le