ALSACE AND LORRAINE.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 May 1918, Page 5

ALSACE AND LORRAINE.

INTERESTING REVELATIONS. SCATHING DENUNCIATION OF HUN HYPOCRISY Speaking at the Sorbonne (Paris) recently, on the occasion of the anniversary of the protest made by the National, Assembly of Representatives of AlsaceLorraine against the annexation of there country by Germany, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs (M. Pichon) spoku as follows: Forty-seven years have passed since the day when the people of Alsace-Lorraine were placed under tho yoke of the conqueror. Never was their will to return to their mother country from which they were torn more strong than at this moment. The protest addressed to the Bordeaux Parliament in the name of the representatives of the Lower Rhine, Upper Rhine, and the Moselle and Meurthe remains the symbol of the unchangeable demands of the people annexed by Germany, in spite of international law. According to the German Chancellor, these are purely German countries, torn from the rightful owners by continued oppression during centuries up to tho day when the French Revolution took to itself what was left after the robbery of former times. This is a remarkahle method. of writing history, which would be astounding if it didOnot emanfcte from the successors of the man who falsified the Ems telegram, and from the head of a Government who had the cynicism to denounce Belgium as having made necessary the invasion of her territory by plotting aggression against the violaters of her neutrality. It is not we, it is the Prussian King himself, who committed, according to statements made at the time, the criminal act which he carried out when he seized your two provinces in order to justify the pretension that he had no other desire than to recover German territory by- incorporating as a right Alsace-Lorraine in his Empire. Here is a document which proves what I have said. It is a letter, some of the contents of which are already known. The ex-Empress Eugenie, to whom it was addressed, recently handed over the original to the Keeper of the National Archives. The letter was written to her from Versailles on October 20, 1870, by William IPs grandfather. I will read it word for word:

After having made immense sacrifices for its defence, Germany wants to be sure that the next war will find her better prepared to repel the aggression which we may be certain will be made as soon as France will have prepared her forces and found allies. That alone is the deplorable consideration, and not a desire to enlarge our country, of which the toritory is big enough, which obliges me to insist on the cession of territories, which has no other object but to make more remote the point of departure of the French armies which in future will come to attack us. Is there any more sweeping argument against the statement of Count Hertling that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was the desire to return to Germany German territories of which she had been dispossessed by French usurpation? Why did the King of Prussia proclaim his determination to take over our provinces? Was it because they were German lands ? No. It wa3 because by an advance into our country he could guarantee German territory against an attack from us. They know it will, these men who, not content with deliberately provoking the mo9t awful of all wars, attempted to draw us into the trap which they have made for the whole of Europe. I have ascertained this by the disclosure of a document drawn up with minute care by the German Chancellery, and carefully deposited among its most secret archives. We were only recently able to establish its undoubted authenticity. It bears the signature of Beth-man-Hollweg, and is dated July 31, 1014. It is known by the official publication in the German White Book that on that day the Imperial Chancellor, in instructing Baron von Schoen, the German Ambassador in Paris, to notify to us that there was a danger of war between Ger, many and Russia, requested the Am. bassador to ask us to remain neutral, and to allow us 18 hours in which to reply. What is not generally known, and what I now reveal, is that the telegram containing these instructions ended with these words:

If the [French Government declare that they will remain neutral, your Excellency will kindly inform them that we must, as a guarantee for neutrality, demand the handing over of the fortresses of Toul and Verdun, which we will occupy, and will restore them on the conclusion of the war with Russia. The reply to the last question must reach here before 4 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. That is how Germany wished for pease at the very moment when she was declaring war. That is a sample of her sincerity while pretending that we compelled her to take up arms in her defence. Such is the price that she intended that we should pay for our baseness if we had been infamous enough to betray our Russian ally, and deny our signature, as [Prussia denies hers, by tearing up the treaty which guaranteed the_ neutrality of Belgium. Who can say where she would have stopped if we had been base enough to swallow the obvious bait dangled before us by her shamafill treachery. The instigators of the war will have tried in vain by the forgery and suppression of documents to escope from the tribunal of the nations and the judgment of posterity. It is 5)0 longer only the representatives of the French nation which say to Alsace and Lorraine: "You will return to your native country." The question is one ■'! a great coalition designed to bar the way to the breakers of the worlds peac -•, and to give the right of international organisation to free peoples. It is the voice of the Old and the New World, from East to West, the prophetic aveng' ing voice which is heard above the din of battles, and strong with the sense ,i justice. It signifies to the powers of death in the struggle against the powers of life the impossibility of aiming at a victory which would be a defeat for '•jMimaiitr I