There are a number of institutions, for instance, which have grown up and covered the country since 1871, which cannot be easily fitted to the ordinary _cadre_ of French departmental government.

The department would be too small a unit.

The German insurance system, again, is far better and more comprehensive than the French, and will have, in one way or another, to be taken over.
But my own strong impression is that goodwill, and the Liberal _fond_, resting on the ideas of 1789, which, in spite of their Catholicism, has always existed in these eastern provinces (Metz, however, has been much more thoroughly Germanised than Strasbourg since the annexation), will see France through.

And meanwhile the recovery of these rich and beautiful countries may well comfort her in some degree for her desolate fields and ruined towns of the North and Centre.

The capital value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and the Germans leave behind them considerable additions to the wealth of the province in the shape of new railway-lines and canals, fine stations, and public buildings, not to speak of the thousands of fruit-trees with which, in German fashion, they have lined the roads--a small, unintentional reparation for the murdered fruit-trees of the North.
* * * * * A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General Gouraud's notes and maps, up into the heart of the "front de Champagne." You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Chalons, with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations.