Alsace is in fact a conclusive example of the fact that the use of a dialect of German origin does not necessarily indicate the race of those who speak it and certainly does not prove a community of sentiments or ideas. This applies also to the German names of the Alsatian communes.
Let us remember on this subject, that very recently German names have been officially given to French localities in Lorraine. When the Germans wish to accomplish a master stroke of policy they are careful to quote the Herren Professoren in justification of the establishment of an historic precedent. Renan, in a mildly bantering spirit, complimented them on their extraordinary talent in these ridiculous attempts. "With the philosophy of history," says he, "as practised by the Germans, there are no legal rights in the world but those of the ourang-outangs, unjustly deprived of these by the perfidy of civilized man."
In the main, it matters little to whom Alsace-Lorraine has belonged during the vicissitudes of history. That only which is important from the point of view of modern history is the act of 1871 by which Germany tore Alsace-Lorraine from France when all the inhabitants of the ceded territories were thoroughly French and wished so to remain. This is the truth, and it is confirmed by an authority little suspected by the Germans. Professor Theobald Ziegler, who up to the present moment was Professor of Science at the University of Strasbourg, and a liberal democrat, has changed to a pan-Germanist of the most pronounced type. Here is what the Herr Professor Ziegler acknowledges, writing in the review Die Grenzboten, March 31, 1915: "What makes a nation? Not the feeling of race nor the consciousness of belonging to the same stock which is often lost in the uncertainty and obscurity of history; not the soil, which may be transferred from one people to another as in the case of Alsace; not the language—one has only to think of Switzerland where three languages are spoken; not even interests in common, for these exist in every society, but just the living together of two centuries shared with the great nation of France has made Alsace-Lorraine French."
But Ziegler and his friends have forgotten that to live together there must be mutual understanding and esteem. History teaches that no appreciable advantage is to be gained unless the peoples agree, or if one nation tries to impose its brutal domination over another. And yet it is just this which is the great obstacle that prevents Germany from assimilating Alsace-Lorraine and has condemned all its efforts to eternal failure.
INCOMPATIBILITY OF DISPOSITION OF THE GERMANS AND THE INHABITANTS OF ALSACE-LORRAINE
In his excellent volume, The Peril of Prussianism, Professor Douglas W. Johnson has traced, in a masterly fashion, the difference between the two ideals of government, one starting with the principle that the State is made to serve the people, the other, that the people are made to serve the State, a view personified by the Kaiser in Germany today.
The Alsaces-Lorraines have always had great independence of character; they are thoroughly democratic and republican, for which reason they so quickly and solidly became a part of the French nation, which, even under different forms of monarchical government, respected their liberty and democratic ideals.
The political history of Alsace-Lorraine furnishes a new proof of this fact on every page. Lorraine became a part of France at the Convention of Friedwald in Hessen, January 14, 1552, when the German Protestant princes at war with the Catholic House of Austria, gave Metz, Toul, and Verdun to the King of France, Henry II., in exchange for subsidies furnished by France.
In the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Alsace was ceded to France in exchange for services which the King gave to the German Protestant princes fighting against the Catholic Empire. Alsace was conquered for France by the German Prince, Bernard de Saxe-Weimar, on the demand and in the interest of Germany which had called upon France for help. Strasbourg, which had remained a free independent city, opened her gates to France in 1681. The Republic of Mulhouse, which made a part of Helvetia, asked, and obtained the request, to be incorporated into France in 1798. Neither Alsace nor Lorraine ever made part of the German Empire founded in 1871, and to which vanquished France was obliged to give up these territories. When these two provinces came into the possession of France, they were bound by rather loose ties to the Holy Roman Empire, of which the House of Austria was at the head. The Austria-Hungary Empire did not survive the Napoleonic wars, and I do not know that it ever claimed any part of Alsace-Lorraine.
On the contrary, in order to found the German Empire and appropriate Alsace-Lorraine, Prussia had to make war on Austria in 1866 to put her out of Germany. The German Empire is wrong, therefore, in making an appeal to anything but force to explain, if not to justify the spoliation of France. Alsace-Lorraine was never a political entity before 1871. We have seen that Alsace was still a part of the Holy Roman Empire, while Lorraine had already belonged to France for a hundred years.