naturally far more violent, in proportion as the interests of France
were more closely at stake. Prussia held the Rhine Province; and French
patriots, who clung to the doctrine of the "natural frontiers"--the
Ocean, Pyrenees, Alps, and Rhine--looked on her as the natural enemy.
They pointed out that millions of Frenchmen had shed their blood in the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to win and to keep the Rhine boundary;
and their most eloquent spokesman, M. Thiers, who had devoted his
historical gifts to glorifying those great days, passionately declaimed
against the policy of helping on the growth of the hereditary foe.

We have already seen the results of this strife between the pro-Prussian
foibles of the Emperor and the eager prejudices of Frenchmen, whose love
of oppressed and divided nations grew in proportion to their distance
from France, and changed to suspicion or hatred in the case of her
neighbours. In 1866, under the breath of ministerial arguments and
oratorical onslaughts Napoleon III.'s policy weakly wavered, thereby
giving to Bismarck's statecraft a decisive triumph all along the line.
In vain did he in the latter part of that year remind the Prussian
statesman of his earlier promises (always discreetly vague) of
compensation for France, and throw out diplomatic feelers for Belgium,
or at any rate Luxemburg[8]. In vain did M. Thiers declare in the
Chamber of Deputies that France, while recognising accomplished facts in
Germany, ought "firmly to declare that we will not allow them to go
further" (March 14, 1867). Bismarck replied to this challenge of the
French orator by publishing five days later the hitherto secret military
alliances concluded with the South German States in August 1866.
Thenceforth France knew that a war with Prussia would be war with a
united Germany.

[8] In 1867 Bismarck's promises went so far as the framing of a secret