ALSACE-LORRAINE
By George Wharton Edwards
Contents
The Lost Provinces
The German Yoke
Ferrette, a Toy Village
Altkirch
The Feast of the Pipers
Mulhouse
Colmar
The Vineyards
Fete Days and Customs
Sainte Odile
The Quaint Houses
Dreien-Eguisheim
Turckheim
Thann
Rosheim
Metz
Strassburg
The Real Reason
The Land of Tears
Bibliography
Index
Excerpt from Foreword
The one dominating purpose of the people of Alsace-Lorraine is their reunion with the mother country: France. A temporary or final autonomy for the Lost Provinces, this "Land of Unshed Tears," is out of the question. The people do not want it. It would be most impracticable to establish it. They would not even discuss it. The people of Alsace-Lorraine consider themselves French and a part of France.
The creation of even a temporary autonomy would be nothing more than a makeshift, a deferring of the whole question, and history shows conclusively that there is no attempted settlement so dangerous to ultimate peace as such a makeshift; a temporary autonomy such as Germany proposes. The only logical way to settle the matter is to sever completely the enforced, undesired and unnatural connection between the provinces and Germany, and return them, with as good grace as they can assume, to their natural place as part of France.
There is no way of causing the self-expatriated inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, who fled rather than live under the Prussian rule, to return to it under an autonomy. In the United States, in England, and in France, there are half a million of Alsatians who would not consent to leave their adopted homes and new occupations for the doubtful opportunity of taking part in a plebiscite in the country of their birth. They know too well the touch of the iron hand.
The seizure in 1871 of Alsace-Lorraine is regarded by the Germans as the crowning triumph and victory of the Bismarckian era of conquest, and it must be made for them by ourselves and our Allies one of the reasons for their defeat in the present war, which that blood-steeped war master of Europe has precipitated upon the nations for their domination.
The wrong done to Belgium is not greater than that done to Alsace-Lorraine, save that the latter country has not yet been so wrecked by fire and sword.
How can the wrong to either nation be righted save by restoration?
How else than by France's recovery of the provinces so wrongfully seized, can Germany be defeated? - Treaties with a government which contemptuously regards them as "scraps of paper" is play for children or Bolsheviki. . .
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