Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...head of a member of the French Mission with true Hohenzollern dexterity, he started more than even he expected. With the American Senate trying to squirm away from under world obligations, Great Britain gasping under active and latent industrial unrest, and the Bolshevik government threatening the Polish frontier, the German monarchists could not have picked a better time for their "comeback." France, alone, has been alive to the dangerous situation, but her warnings were only recently branded by President Wilson as imperialistic tendencies...
Some time was devoted by the lecturer to historical background. To German geographers and historians, the Rhine is a German river, he declared, while since the 17th century there have not been lacking in France certain historians and geographers who have maintained that the Rhine was the natural frontier of France, as it had been of Roman Gaul. But to one approaching the matter without nationalistic prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been determined, Professor Haskins said, not by any geographical necessity, but by the vicissitudes of history...
...ultimate demands to the substantial results which the treaty secured. Comparatively few Frenchmen demanded the outright annexation of the left bank, the speaker admitted, nor was the number large who wished to prepare for it by an indefinitely prolonged military occupation. It was maintained that this was the real frontier of all the Allies, the front line that must be held at all cost against Germany. As to the intervening territory, a favorite French solution was that of an independent buffer state under French protection. At one time there were signs of a movement toward separation, for the Catholic Rhineland...
...Valley of the Saar, Professor Haskins showed how it became an interrelated problem of the Rhine and a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine. He also clearly described the French boundary lines through history, saying that the loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth...
...Curiously enough, those who were most eager for the program of an ambitious League were the first to criticise the creation of such commissions and their tasks. But if one of the chief objects of such a League is to promote world peace, surely the Franco-German frontier is an important point for it to watch. And if the League can ease the tension here by acting as a sort of shock-absorber, protecting at the same time the property rights of France and the personal rights of the inhabitants, it will serve another interest no less important than peace...