Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/7

 Rh For what was it, after all, that Prussia did after the Franco-Prussian War? She forcibly took over two great populations of passionately patriotic Frenchmen, about whose allegiance and affections there was at the time literally no doubt whatever. They not only personally felt, but they publicly declared, that they were being carried into captivity against their will. If voting is so very important, the vote was overwhelming. Large masses of them, having expressed their feelings thus, expressed the same feelings further by leaving the country at great sacrifice, that they might continue to live under the French flag. For the last forty years a continuous stream of them has poured over the frontier: men who deliberately left their native province in order to live in their native land. In their place came Germans, many of them planted there officially, nearly all of them planted artificially; according to the same principle by which Prussia was making artificial plantations in Poland.

Now for this sort of official colonisation despotic power is obviously useful, is often necessary. A tyrannical Government can manage such things infinitely more easily than a free Government. If the French Republic told a Breton who was fond of Brittany to go and live in Alsace, he would not go. But Prussia can always command a type of tame population which will go anywhere to which the route is officially organised. She will never lack colonists equipped with every convenience, except the capacity to colonise. It is, therefore, simply as plain as a pikestaff (a very appropriate figure for the staff of the Teutonic pilgrim) that if we accept