the most depraved of Parisian sensations are invented to meet the jaded fancy of gilded youth from across the sea.
A French cartoon more than a century old pictures a peasant ploughing in the field, hopeless and dejected, a frilled and cynical marquis on his back, tapping his gilded snuff-box. A recent one shows the peasant still at the plough and equally hopeless. The marquis is gone, but in his place sits a soldier armed to the teeth, who ought himself to be at the plough, while on the soldier's back rides the money-lender, colder and more crushing than the dainty marquis, for the money-lender is the visible exponent of the war-trader, most sinister and most burdensome of all purveyors of implements of destruction.
For more than forty years past France has lived under the shadow of war. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine cut a deep wound in French emotions as well as in French pride. The noble attitude of the lost provinces stimulated the natural determination for the "war of honor," the "war of revenge." But as time went on, it became more and more evident that such a war could never be successful. And after the collapse of the inflated militarism of Boulenger, and in view of the sordid failure of military honor as shown in the "Dreyfus case," the people of France began generally to doubt the righteousness as well as the wisdom of war against Germany. In 1913, the influential men of France were willing to meet half way the "Friedensfreunde" of Germany. The writer was present at Nürnberg in 1913, at a great mass meeting in which the Baron D'Estournelles de Constant spoke warmly and eloquently for international friendship. France was becoming ready to forgive if not to forget. But this the Prussian military system in Alsace-Lorraine would not permit. They had left the united province of Elsass-Lothringen without citizens' rights as "Reichsland" or Imperial territory, it being an "Eroberung" or conquest. They had subjected it to the process of "Entwelschung" or deforeignization, by means of trivial and burdensome "Abwehrgesetze" or special statutes directed mainly against the use of the French language. The people of Alsace-Lorraine, those of Germanic and French stock alike, could not forget. And for this reason France could not. Had the united provinces been given full autonomy within the German Empire and their people been made full citizens instead of "Deutsche Zweiter Classe," "the nightmare of Europe,"[1] the question of Alsace-Lorraine would long ago have vanished from European politics.
It is a common saying in France, that the Frenchmen of to-day are small because our tall ancestors were killed in our victorious wars.
The statistics behind this statement have been made the basis of a critical study by Professor Vernon L. Kellogg. A synopsis of the results of this study is given in Social Hygiene, December, 1914.[2]
