"The fact is I am a little puzzled with "Liberals" who go in for enslaving Lorraine and turning Elsass, as Bismarck puts it, into a "German Venetia." It is not a question of loving France or loving Germany. It is a question of falling back on the platform of the Treaty of Vienna and dealing with peoples as if they were cyphers. Your indifference to the will of the people themselves is of the old Tory and Metternich order. I never yet met a French provincial to whom France was not more than his own province. In Normandy, for instance, you never could get a Norman to see things in your way. Alsatians I meet now every day at Sydenham; they speak German, but they are French to the core. There can be no question about the Lorrainers. The truth is you care a good deal for freedom in the past,—but in the present you hate France more than you love liberty."
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People from OxfordHistorians from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomLibrarians from England
Original Language: English
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Letter to Edward Augustus Freeman (13 September 1870), quoted in Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Stephen (1901), pp. 262-263
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Richard_Green
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John Richard Green
John Richard Green (12 December 1837 – 7 March 1883) was an English historian chiefly known for his 1874 work A Short History of the English People.
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