1. The French have never forgotten their defeat in 1870 and 1871. They have always been thirsting for revenge.
2. We are at war because Russia thinks she has a mission on behalf of the Slavic world; she feels that mission can only be fulfilled by smashing Germany, the bulwark of Western idea.
3. We are at war because England has returned to her old political ideals. She means to enforce anew the balance of power and she wants to cut down Germany to that normal dead-level which alone, she thinks, is consistent with her own security.
As far as our antagonism to France is concerned, we have always looked upon it as a regrettable fact which time, perhaps, might do away with. We are just enough to understand that a country like France, with a glorious past, a gallant spirit and an undaunted courage, cannot forget the blow we dealt her forty-three years ago.
We think we have been right in retaking from her Alsace-Lorraine, belonging originally to the German Empire. But we look with a kind of envy upon her who succeeded in denationalizing the people of those provinces to such a degree that we have not yet been able to make them Germans once more.
We have always regretted that the two most civilized nations in Continental Europe should be rent asunder by an unforgotten past.
We hoped that the creation of a wonderful African empire might in the long run soothe French national feeling. We should have been always willing to come to an understanding on the existing state of affairs, but though there have been lucky statesmen in France who tried such a policy, public opinion was too strong for them. French people preferred to sacrifice the main ideas on which their republican government is based and made an alliance with Russia.
Religious, national, and political oppression in Russia against Pole, Jew, and Finn, against workingman and intellectual, is propped up by the help of liberal thinking France, whose conservatism threw a Western glamour over Russian ill-deeds.
We have regretted more than words can say it that France has annihilated herself as a power for the moral improvement of the universe by making herself a tool of the Russian Juggernaut.
We read in the papers today that after a small frontier engagement in Alsace-Lorraine the signs of mourning were taken off from the statues representing Alsatian towns on Parisian squares.