etz she might as well keep Lille. Her
claim to Strasbourg is not better than her claim to Cambrai.

And this is a thing which "the man in the street" fails sometimes to
understand. He says: "Yes, we know, Alsace-Lorraine was taken from
France forty-seven years ago by violence, without the people of the
occupied territories being consulted. But how did France acquire
Alsace-Lorraine in previous times? Was it not also by force after
successful wars? Is it not a fact that Alsace-Lorraine, in days of
yore, belonged to Germany, and that, historically, Alsace is a German
land?"

No, it is precisely not a fact. It is the contrary of a fact and of
truth. And this must be made clear, once for all.

When France demands Alsace-Lorraine, she does not do so because she
will have some more departments in her geographical configuration, but
because these territories belonged to France during centuries and
centuries, because they were taken from France by force forty-seven
years ago, because the people of these territories not only were never
consulted, but also protested against Prussian domination--because, in
a word, it is a question of right.

In a speech, which he delivered on the 24th of January, 1918, before
the Reichstag, Count von Hertling, the Imperial German Chancellor,
expressed himself as follows:

Alsace-Lorraine comprises, as is known, for the most part
purely German regions which by a century long of violence
and illegality were severed from the German Empire, until
finally in 1779 the French Revolution swallowed up the last
remnant. Alsace and Lorraine then became French provinces.
When in the war of 1870, we demanded back the district which
had been criminally wrested from us, that was not a conquest
of foreign territory but, rightly and properly speaking,
what today is called disannexation.

It is doubtful that Count von Hertling will ever leave in history the
memory of a great Chancellor; but, if he does, it will be no doubt in
the History of Ignorance and Falsehood. Never has a statesman in so
few words uttered with such impudence so many untruths!

Historically speaking, there are in Alsace-Lorraine three parts: there
is Lorraine, there is Alsace, and there is the southern part of
Alsace including the town of Mulhouse.

As regards the town of Mulhouse, the question is most simple and
clear. The town never, at any time, belonged to Germany or to the
Germans. I