ent and
combination of the Slav States in Europe, in a more effective alliance
with Russia, and a _rapprochement_ between the Latin nations.

March 27, 1899. [2]

By our resistance, since the national defeat of 1871, we have pledged
ourselves not to accept it. Our moral position and the dignity of our
claims to restitution have been worthy of our history because we
inveterate Frenchmen have never ceased to maintain that our power over
Alsace-Lorraine has been overthrown by force, but that our rights
remain undiminished. Austria, to Germany, and Italy, to Austria, have
sacrificed this moral position and the dignity of their respective
claims, in return for an alliance which, besides being treacherously
false, has brought them neither wealth nor honour.

But alas! even whilst our rights became strengthened by our very
faithfulness and constancy, our rulers were yielding to the insidious
counsels of the enemy. M. Ferry listened to Bismarck and slowly, drop
by drop, we wasted the blood with which we should have reconquered
Alsace-Lorraine. Bismarck, seeing us regaining our strength too
quickly for his liking, and becoming a danger to Germany, and prevented
by the Tzar from stopping our recovery by striking at us again, played
his hand so as to throw us headlong into a policy of colonial
adventures. But the Great Iron Chancellor, the would-be genial fellow,
had not foreseen that his pupil William II would be inspired by
ambitions entirely different from his own: that of a relentless
colonial policy, that of commercial and industrial development, on
broad lines of encroachment, and that of a navy. All these things
however, followed logically, one from the other; for profitable
colonisation one must have a market for one's produce, and to protect a
mercantile marine one must have a navy. Therefore, under these
conditions, which Bismarck did not foresee, the danger to France became
an immediate and equal danger to Germany, for England would be free to
sweep the seas of Germany's merchantmen as well as those of France.

Certain misguided people, moved by their extravagant feelings either of
hatred towards England or of fear, seized the opportunity of the hour
of danger under cover of the well-worn word (which leads so many worthy
folk to lose their heads, even when it represents just the opposite of
what it means) pleading our _interests_, I say, seized the opportunity
to lower France by making overtures to the Ka