tinent. The Treaty of Frankfort marks one of the
blackest dates in modern European history. That
treaty was based upon the principle of force and upon
no other. The unrelieved and unqualified assertion
of that principle in the latter half of the nineteenth
century represented a lamentable retrogression to
the old and fatal ideas and customs of the Middle
Ages and the Old Régime. It made public law
synonymous once more with successful violence.
It proclaimed not only the legitimacy but the de-
sirability of war as the primary ideal of ambitious
nations. It inferentially exalted the doctrine of the
survival of the fittest, the fittest being those strong-
est in military power.

There was no justification for such an act in the
year 1871. It was not needed to complete the
unification of Germany, if that would have been a
justification. The unification of Germany, an event
with which the liberal world generally sympathized,
was completed by the coöperation of all the Ger-
man states in the common undertaking of the war.
It would have been assured just as inevitably had
Bismarck consented to make peace at Ferrières on
the basis of cession, to use the phrase employed by
Jules Favre, of "not one inch of our territory, not
one stone of our fortresses." The new French Re-

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