Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/2



HE practical proposal that the war should end, substantially with a German evacuation of Belgium and Serbia, is certainly not so impossible, at least in the physical sense, as some might suppose. Nay, it might well be regarded as an example of history repeating itself. It might be said that the Germans have proved in the past that they possess the magnanimity and sagacity to withdraw their armies from lands in which they were in armed occupation. Thus it is a fact to be gravely noted that after 1870 the Germans did not continue to occupy the whole of France for ever. Although the King of Prussia was so satisfied with the taste and comfort of the Palace of Versailles that he selected it among all his country residences for the scene of his coronation as German Emperor, yet he good-naturedly withdrew after a time and exiled himself from these familiar scenes, retiring to some modest and unpretentious home in Potsdam or Berlin. The conquerors were even then too temperate and merciful to impose upon all the citizens of France that admirable system of German education, necessarily accompanied by the imposition of the German language, which they have imposed on that fringe of more fortunate Frenchmen whom they found living in Alsace. Notre-Dame de Paris has not, after all, become in any sense a German cathedral in the same fashion as Cologne; and the quaint old symbol of the French flag, as well as a quite distinctive dress for French policemen and soldiers,