FOOTNOTES:
[31] Dietrich Schäfer, “Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze,” in Internationale Wochenschrift, vii, p. 19 (1912).
[32] Articles 354-362.
[33] Article 65.
[34] Articles 358-360.
[35] E. Denis, in Travaux du Comité d’études, i, p. 414.
[36] Articles 428-432.
[37] These treaties, the American one not yet ratified, and the agreements concerning occupation of the Rhine will be found in the Supplement to the American Journal of International Law, xiii, pp. 404-416.
[38] Facsimiles in Atlas of the Comité d’Etudes.
[39] “Landau et Sarrelouis villes françaises,” in Revue de Paris, March 15, 1919.
[40] Articles 42-50 and annex, with official map.
[41] Annex to the Saar section of the treaty, § 23.
[42] Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 263.
V
POLAND
Among all the results of the War and of the Peace Treaties, there is, perhaps, none which would have caused our forefathers greater joy or greater astonishment than the resurrection of Poland. It is heartening to dwell for a moment on the moral significance of this great event, and to recall what the name of Poland stood for down to the time when Bismarck banished sentiment from politics and attempted to exorcise the idea of an ‘immanent justice’ in history.
To every generation of the nineteenth century, down to 1870 at least, Poland furnished the supreme example both of what people then called ‘the crimes of despotism,’ and of a liberty-loving nation struggling with unsurpassed heroism against wellnigh insuperable odds. The restoration of Poland signified something more than the mere revival of a vanished state: it stood for the triumphant righting of the greatest political wrong that Europe had witnessed, the vindication of the principles of justice in international relations, a decisive victory for the cause of universal liberty. Hence the Polish cause called forth a unanimity of sympathy from all civilized nations which no other similar movement, not even the Italian one, was able to command. In England, France, and Italy, liberals, conservatives, and clericals alike—men of such diverse opinions as Gladstone and Disraeli, Montalembert and Victor Hugo, Mazzini and Pius IX—were very much of one mind with respect to Poland. In France particularly every success or reverse of the Polish cause was greeted as if it were a triumph or a defeat for France herself. It is said that after the fall of Warsaw in 1831 the gloom and consternation at Paris were greater than after Waterloo. Even in Germany Bismarck felt bound to reproach his compatriots of the 1848 period for being more concerned about the liberty of Poland than about their own national problem. There too people sang of Poland:
“Dein Sieg is ein Völkersieg,
Dein Krieg ist ein heiliger Krieg.”
And from America also one might cite many expressions of such sentiments. Jefferson denounced the partition of Poland as a “baneful precedent,” a “crime,” and an “atrocity.” Henry Wharton called it “the most flagrant violation of natural justice and international law which has occurred since Europe first emerged from barbarism.”
But unanimous as was the opinion of the public regarding the justice of the Polish cause, among statesmen and politicians the idea was scarcely less general that from a practical standpoint that cause was hopeless. Lord Salisbury in a famous essay attempted to prove that the restoration of an independent Poland was “a mere chimera.” Guizot in his Memoirs demonstrated in his most magistral fashion that the difficulties in the way of the Polish patriots were incomparably greater than those that beset any other national movement: for here it was a question of liberating a people, not from one foreign oppressor, but from three, and those three the strongest military monarchies in Europe, permanently united by their common interest in keeping their victim enchained. No other power in Europe was strong enough to liberate Poland, and it was doubtful whether all the other powers together were strong enough to do so. At all events, the thing could not be done without a general war, involving the entire continent and upsetting the whole existing political system. And as time wore on, as one insurrection after another failed and one hope of foreign intervention after another proved delusive, the Poles themselves came to pin their faith chiefly to some such catastrophic solution. Sixty or seventy years before it came about, their poets began to prophesy a day of conflict such as the world had never yet seen, and in that day should Poland rise again and triumph. Mickiewicz, in that “Litany of the Polish Pilgrim” which is the most poignant expression both of the sufferings and of the undying hopes of his people, inserts the prayer:
“For a universal war for the freedom of the nations,
We beseech Thee, O Lord.”
“The great far-off divine event,” thus dimly forecast, has been realized before our eyes. And however obdurate fate might hitherto have been to the Poles, it must be admitted that during the World War all things have worked together marvellously to serve the cause of Poland. By an irony of fortune, the Partitioning Powers themselves were the first to proclaim the principle of the restoration of Poland, although in half-hearted and ambiguous fashion. The Russian Revolution removed the great obstacle to an honest treatment of the Polish question by the Entente. Through President Wilson’s efforts, the principle of the restoration of a united and independent Poland was definitively and unequivocally inscribed among the war aims of the Allies; and the collapse of the Central Powers afforded the possibility of carrying out this principle with a completeness which two years ago few friends of Poland could have believed possible.
But granted that Poland was to be restored, what was Poland? What territory should it include, and what were its proper boundaries? As to such questions it may be doubted whether any Allied statesman or the public in any of the Allied countries two years ago had any very definite ideas. Italia Irredenta, Greater Greece, Greater Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, even Czecho-Slovakia—those were concepts simple and familiar in comparison with that of Poland reincarnate. For Poland had been erased from the map so long that it had come to be regarded as a name, a memory, a cause, rather than a country. Poland was a ghost roaming around in the Sarmatian plain, somewhere between Germany and Russia. But what were the limits of its habitat few persons knew, nor what this disembodied spirit would look like if clothed again in flesh and blood.
Moreover the problem was in itself very difficult. Geographically, Poland is one of the hardest countries in the world to define. Clearly marked natural frontiers are lacking; or else, when they can be discerned, they do not coincide with the historic political boundaries or with present ethnographic ones. The Carpathians, for instance, seem to offer an admirable natural frontier on the south; nevertheless the boundaries of the old Polish state overlapped this mountain range for a considerable distance, and so does the Polish linguistic frontier today. On the north the Baltic ought to form the natural limit of Poland; but historically Poland had seldom held more than a narrow frontage upon that sea, and today the area of Polish-speaking population touches the Baltic only along a short stretch of coast just west of Danzig. On the east and west no natural barriers whatever are to be found in the vast unbroken plain which stretches across northern Europe from the Low Countries to the Urals.
It is true that Polish geographers are accustomed to treat the whole region between the Baltic, the Carpathians, the Dvina, and the Dnieper as one country; to claim for it a high degree of physical unity with respect to its structure, climate, productions, river systems, and other features; and to argue that this entire area ought likewise to form a political unit—Poland. ‘Geographic Poland’ thus defined is practically identical with the historic Polish state as it was in its later period (a coincidence which may be explained as an illustration, either of the effects of geographic laws on history, or of the workings of historic facts on the minds of geographers). It must be admitted that Russian scientists have demonstrated with equal ease that nearly all of the region in question is geographically a part of Russia; while the patriotic scholars of Kiev and Lemberg have proved that nature intended a great part of this same region to belong to neither Poland nor Russia, but to a tertium quid called the Ukraine.
‘Ethnographic Poland,’ i. e., the region which has a majority of Polish-speaking population, is an area easier to define. It includes nearly the whole of the so-called ‘Congress Kingdom’ of Poland (that small realm which was set up by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and suppressed by Russia a few years later); most of the former Prussian province of Posen; parts of the Prussian provinces of East and West Prussia and Silesia; most of the duchy of Teschen in Austrian Silesia; and the western part of Galicia. Ethnographic Poland thus defined has an area of about 82,000 square miles: i. e., it is about as large as Kansas or Minnesota, or three-fourths as large as Italy. It had a population in 1910 of twenty millions. About sixty per cent of it belonged to Russia; twenty-five per cent to Prussia; fifteen per cent to Austria.
In addition, there are many Polish enclaves scattered about in eastern Galicia and in the Russian provinces to the east of the Congress Kingdom. For these adjacent provinces on the east, the Russian nationality statistics are so grossly inaccurate and fraudulent that we are left in great uncertainty as to the real ethnographic situation and the exact relative strength of the numerous races[43] which inhabit this debatable region (Poles, Lithuanians, White Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, etc.). There is much reason to suppose, however, that if ever an honest census is taken here, the eastern limits of the Polish ethnographic area will be extended considerably beyond the boundaries of the Congress Kingdom.
Historically, the name Poland has been applied to a state with very widely fluctuating frontiers. The original Polish kingdom, as it grew up in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries under its first dynasty, the house of the Piasts, was a comparatively small state. It embraced the area which forms ethnographic Poland today, and also the rest of Silesia and Pomerania. Having the Oder for a part of its western boundary and a broad strip of Baltic coast line, Poland in its earliest period enjoyed better natural frontiers than it was ever later to possess.
Unfortunately, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the realm was rent asunder by partitions and civil wars among its princes, and weakened by the invasions and devastations of the Mongols. Taking advantage of this situation, the Germanic Drang nach Osten, which the Poles had hitherto arrested at the cost of much hard fighting, set in with redoubled vigor and unparalleled success. It was at this time that Pomerania and Silesia were lost to Poland,—although in Upper Silesia a large and compact Polish population has for six hundred years successfully resisted that process of more or less violent Germanization to which so many of the western Slavs succumbed. It was at this time also that the Germans, led by the Teutonic Knights, succeeded in planting a colony in Prussia, thus cutting off Poland from the sea and inaugurating that struggle for the mouth of the Vistula which has gone on intermittently ever since.
When Poland in the fourteenth century regained her unity and strength, it was now too late to recover most of the territories thus lost: it was rather a question whether the shattered kingdom could even defend what was left to it against the Germanic onrush. Seeking resources and allies for that struggle, Poland turned to the East. The conquest of the principality of Halicz (Eastern Galicia) in 1340 marked the beginning of Polish encroachments upon the Ukrainian nationality. Still more important was the union effected in 1386 between Poland and Lithuania. For the Lithuanian empire, built up with such amazing rapidity during the fourteenth century, included nearly the whole area inhabited by the Ukrainian and White Russian races; it spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea and far beyond the Dnieper. Through the union concluded in 1386 there arose a realm which was to be for several centuries the strongest power in Eastern Europe, and which remained down to the time of the Partitions the second or third largest state on the Continent.
The most immediate result of this union was that Poland and Lithuania combined could renew their traditional struggle against the Teutonic Knights and fight it through to a successful conclusion. Not the least of the circumstances that contributed to their victory was the fact that, in the crisis of the conflict, the majority of the German nobles and cities of Prussia deserted the Knights and joined King Casimir, preferring the liberty which Poland could offer them to the tyrannous rule of the Teutonic Order. This was the second of those voluntary unions which form so striking and peculiar a feature of Polish history. By the peace of Thorn (1466), which ended this Hundred Years’ War, Danzig and West Prussia were incorporated in Poland, although with guarantees for a large measure of self-government, while East Prussia was left to the vanquished Knights to be held as a fief of Poland. Thus the mouth of the Vistula and a frontage upon the Baltic had been recovered and were to remain in Polish possession for the next three hundred years. Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, however, the Prussian question was not completely liquidated, as it might have been both in 1466 and on several later occasions. With a generosity or a lack of foresight which later historians have found it very hard to excuse, the Polish government in 1525 permitted the Teutonic Grand Master, Albert of Hohenzollern, to secularize East Prussia and turn it into a duchy hereditary in his family, though still a fief of Poland; and on the extinction of his line in 1618, Poland was induced to allow the transfer of the duchy to the Brandenburg branch of the family—the first great step towards the building up of that Hohenzollern monarchy which was to be the worst foe of Poland.
Another most important result of the union of 1386 was the gradual fusion of Lithuania with Poland. History affords few stranger spectacles than this process by which the much larger and originally stronger state voluntarily submitted to being assimilated and absorbed by the smaller one. That result was due to the attractions which the more advanced civilization of Poland possessed for the upper classes in the Lithuanian realm; to the desire of the Lithuanian noblesse to secure the liberties and privileges of the Polish nobles; and to the remarkable tact, cleverness, and perseverance with which for centuries the Poles pursued the aim of binding their somewhat wayward neighbor irrevocably to their side. The union between the two states, originally based solely on the person of the common ruler, was steadily strengthened until by the agreement of 1569 it was turned into a permanent organic union—a partnership which was to last through good days and through evil until the Partitions.
In this combined state the nobility and to a large extent the bourgeoisie of the non-Polish races came spontaneously to adopt the Polish language, customs, religion, nationality—became in fact quite Polonized. The institutions of Lithuania were assimilated in all respects to those of Poland; Polish culture became predominant from Kiev to Wilno, from Livonia to the Carpathians—in short, this composite and originally so heterogeneous state became essentially a Polish one. Thus, by statesmanship and tenacity, by the higher culture they could offer and the liberties they extended, the Polish race had peaceably conquered a great empire in the east, a realm twice the size of the modest Poland of the Piasts; and a vast field was opened up for colonization and the extension of Polish nationality.
The hundred years of Russian rule since the Partitions and violent attempts at Russification have by no means destroyed, although they have in part impaired, the results of four centuries of Polonization in the eastern territories. Even today, in Lithuania proper and in large areas of White Russia and the western Ukraine, the country gentry and the non-Jewish population of the towns are predominantly Polish; Wilno, the ancient capital of Lithuania, is still almost as much a Polish city as Warsaw; Polish colonies are thickly scattered about in the rural districts; and socially, intellectually, and economically, the Poles remain the most important element in the population.
It would probably be true to say that the average Pole has today, at the back of his head, the feeling that his country is not merely the modest area of ethnographic Poland, but the whole wide expanse of historic Poland—Poland as it was in 1772, just before the Partitions. This conception is based partly upon the principle that the Partitions, as acts of lawless usurpation, could have no legal validity, so that de jure Poland still exists within her frontiers of 1772; partly upon the view that the lands between the Carpathians, the Baltic, the Dnieper, and the Dvina possess so high a degree of geographical, economic, and cultural unity that they deserve to be considered as one country. But above all, it is a matter of historic traditions, of time-hallowed associations and sentiments, of deeply rooted habits of thought. It would be difficult for Poles today to forget that for centuries their race has been as much at home in Wilno, Mohylew, Minsk, or Kamieniec, as in Cracow or Warsaw; and that half of the greatest figures in Polish history have come from these eastern lands beyond the pale of ethnographic Poland. Kosciuszko, their national hero, and Mickiewicz, their national poet, were both from Lithuania. The two men at the head of the Polish state in the past year, Pilsudski and Paderewski, come, the one from Lithuania, the other from the Ukraine. For generations Poland has spent an infinite amount of effort in organizing and civilizing these eastern territories and in defending them against Swedes and Muscovites, Turks and Tartars. Their churches are full of the tombs of Polish heroes, and their fields are soaked in Polish blood.
Moreover, one cannot ignore the feeling with which the present generation looks back upon the Polish state of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For most outsiders the Partitions have overshadowed all the preceding period of Polish history. Such observers have fastened their eyes too exclusively upon the deplorable conditions into which Poland had fallen just before her dismemberment, and have concluded that her history is chiefly made up of a tissue of mistakes, sins, and follies, interesting only as furnishing a terrible example of how a state ought not to be governed and of how badly a people can mismanage its national life. But the Poles, while conscious enough of the mistakes in question, point out that their decadent period of a hundred years or so just before the Partitions ought not to obscure or outweigh the record of the three glorious centuries preceding the decline; and in that earlier better period they find much reason for cherishing feelings of pride, veneration, and piety towards that old republic which has been so much condemned and so much misunderstood. And there is much to justify such an attitude.
The old Polish state was an experiment of a highly original and interesting character. It was a republic both in name and in fact, although nominally it had a king as its first magistrate. It was the largest and most ambitious experiment with a republican form of government that the world had seen since the days of the Romans. Moreover, it was the first experiment on a large scale with a federal republic down to the appearance of the United States. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this republic was the freest state in Europe, the state in which the greatest degree of constitutional, civic, and intellectual liberty prevailed. In an age of religious persecution and chronic religious wars, Poland knew no such troubles; it offered almost complete toleration and an asylum to those fleeing from persecution in all western lands. Like the United States today, Poland was at that time the melting-pot of Europe, the haven for the poor and oppressed of all the neighboring countries—Germans, Jews, Czechs, Magyars, Armenians, Tartars, Russians, and others. The complications of the nationality problem in Poland today are due in no small measure to the great numbers of aliens who here found a refuge from political and religious persecution. Finally, the old republic represented an effort to organize the vast open plain between the Baltic and the Black Sea—a region containing so many weak and undeveloped races and a region so much exposed to Germanic ambitions on the one side and to Turco-Tartar onslaughts on the other side—into a compact and powerful realm, which was directed indeed by the strongest and most advanced race within its borders—the Poles—but which in its better period allowed a genuine equality to the other races and extensive self-government to some of them.
A great enthusiasm for freedom in almost every branch of life; the principle of the sovereignty of the nation, calling the citizens to participate in the responsibilities of government; the conception of the state as not a thing existing for itself, but as an instrument serving the wellbeing of society; aversion to absolute monarchy, standing armies, and militarism; disinclination to undertake aggressive wars, but a remarkable tendency to form voluntary unions with neighboring peoples—such are some of the hallmarks of the old Polish state, which make it stand out as a unique exception among the rapacious and militaristic monarchies of that age. The Poles have been only too frequently reproached for having created such a state and for not having imitated the institutions and the spirit of their neighbors; but today, after a war in which Prussia symbolized precisely the principles which Poland is blamed for not having adopted, and the Allies have stood for ideals closely akin to those of old Poland, it would seem that the time has come for a revision of our judgments about the old Polish republic.
For some such reasons the Poles today, while recognizing the many blemishes that crept into the republic, particularly in its later period, are still inclined to hold that this Polish-Lithuanian-White Russian-Ukrainian-Prussian federation—which the old republic really was—represented a political organization so entirely adapted to the needs of that part of Europe, so much in the nature of things, that its violent disruption at the hands of its neighbors must be a matter of regret, and its restoration, in part, at least, on some twentieth century basis a goal to be kept in view.
Since the Partitions the situation has, of course, been very substantially modified. The partitioning governments have not labored in vain to break down or destroy Polish influences in many parts of the former republic; and in recent decades strong nationalist movements have also grown up among two of the races once united to Poland, the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians. Hence no one in Poland today believes it possible or desirable simply to incorporate all the lands of the old republic in the new Polish state. No one proposes to compel the other races which have developed pronounced nationalist movements to unite with Poland against their will.
But it is, I think, the general desire of the Poles to save as much of their ancient heritage as can legitimately be done. Most of them seem to feel that those eastern territories of the old republic in which Polish culture is still predominant, and in which there is no indigenous nationalist movement, ought to return to Poland. Many Poles hope that the Lithuanians and possibly even the Ukrainians can be won over to voluntarily accepting a federal union with Poland. Doubtless this federal idea lies behind the demand recently presented to the Bolsheviki by the Polish government: the demand that Soviet Russia should renounce its claim to all territories west of the old Polish frontiers of 1772. Ever since 1863, at least, it has been a favorite thesis of Polish democrats and even Socialists that the only way to effect a solution of the problem of the debatable eastern territories, in accordance both with outraged legality and with the principle of national self-determination, is to force Russia to renounce what she usurped at the time of the Partitions, and then to leave the liberated populations free either to renew their historic federal union with Poland or to make any other political arrangements that they choose.
There is no need to pass judgment here upon the justice or expediency of such ideas. But they cannot be ignored; and it certainly does not advance us toward a solution of these questions, nor is it a sign of insight or fair-mindedness, to brand these ideas as due simply to ‘Polish imperialism’ or ‘chauvinism’ or ‘megalomania,’ as our Liberal journals are fond of doing; or to castigate the Poles for claiming a single mile of territory outside the area where—according to the statistics prepared by governments hostile to them—there is demonstrably a Polish-speaking majority. No nation with a thousand years of history behind it could be expected to rise to such heights of self-abnegation.
The wide dispersion of the Polish race, the divergence between what is ethnically Polish today and what was historically, and still is in part culturally, Polish; the lack of adequate data as to the ethnic makeup and political gravitation of so many of the border populations; the lack of clear-cut, natural frontiers—such are some of the difficulties in the way of defining Poland’s proper boundaries.
The Allied statesmen met at Paris already committed to the programme of the restoration of a “united and independent Poland.” President Wilson in the Fourteen Points had laid down the principle that “an independent Polish state should be created which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.” The prime ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy, in their declaration of June 3, 1918, had also affirmed that “the creation of a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea constitutes one of the conditions of a solid and just peace and of the rule of right in Europe.”
It may be that, when it came to the test, some of the Allied statesmen, out of a desire to create a Polish state capable of becoming a useful ally against Germany, were inclined to go beyond the limits of these definitions; and that other Allied statesmen were tempted to do somewhat less than they had promised, for fear of pressing Germany too hard and of incurring liabilities in the East that might be onerous in the future. Nevertheless, these tendencies very largely neutralized each other; and the outcome has been a settlement of the Polish territorial problems which, in so far as it has been completed, may be regarded as an honest application of the principles laid down in the Fourteen Points.
The settlement is necessarily incomplete because the Conference could make definitive arrangements only with regard to Prussian and Austrian Poland. We were not at war with Russia; the Conference had neither the right nor the wish to dispose of Russian territory without Russia’s consent; and there was no recognized Russian government with which a voluntary settlement could be negotiated. It was possible to assume that Russia had renounced all claims to Warsaw and to the so-called Congress Kingdom, because the government of Prince Lvov, in March 1917, had spontaneously accepted the principle of “an independent Polish state including all regions with an indisputable Polish ethnic majority.” But it has been impossible down to the present to assign definitive limits to this state on the east, in those debatable regions where the ethnographic situation and the wishes of the population are so doubtful, and where Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian claims all come into collision.[44] Hence Poland so far has boundaries fixed only on the west, northwest, and south.
Of all the parts of the Versailles Peace Treaty, there is perhaps none which it required greater moral courage to make or which it may be more difficult to uphold than the Polish-German settlement. That settlement has, I think, been not a little misunderstood; and a certain section of the press in this country and in England has frequently denounced it as one of the great iniquities of the Peace Treaty, the spoliation of Prussia, the sacrifice of millions of innocent Germans to the Moloch of Polish imperialism. It is, of course, true that the Germans do not like it, and that none of the other territorial sacrifices imposed upon them have called forth such indignation and rage. But could anyone expect that they would like it? Since the rise of Prussia was accomplished mainly by the spoliation of Poland, could anyone hope to effect a genuine restoration of Poland without taking a great deal of land away from Prussia?
It is also true that the treaty incorporates a good many Germans into the new Polish state. In the provinces ceded outright to Poland, the ratio is about 1,000,000 Germans to 1,800,000 Poles. If all the plebiscites provided for go against Germany, the total of the territories which Poland will have acquired from Prussia will contain about 2,100,000 Germans as against 3,400,000 Poles.[45]
Regrettable as this may be, the following observations may be made upon it. In the first place, if the real facts were known, the ratio would undoubtedly be found to be much more favorable to the Poles. For the figures just cited are based upon the Prussian official language statistics; and it has been demonstrated by the most painstaking and detailed investigations—and it is admitted by honest people even in Germany—that these statistics are grossly inaccurate, are in fact deliberately falsified for the purpose of making it appear that Prussia’s Germanizing policy in her ‘Eastern Marches’ has been more successful than is actually the case. Some idea of the discrepancy between fact and fiction may be gathered by comparing these linguistic statistics with the Prussian school census, which is equally official but less distorted for political purposes. One finds, for instance, such glaring contradictions as that the circle of Lyck contains only 51% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 79% according to the school census; Sensburg has 49% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 78% according to the school census; Lötzen 35% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 70% according to the school census. The Peace Conference, although knowing the character of the Prussian language statistics, nevertheless adopted them as its criterion in order to be scrupulously fair to the Germans; but the facts just cited suggest that the real number of Germans transferred to Poland is far less than Prussian-made statistics would indicate.
Furthermore, a large number of these Germans have, so to speak, no right to be there. Everyone knows with what infinite patience, vast expenditure of money and effort, and perfect indifference to justice or morality, the Prussian government has worked to fill its eastern provinces with Germans and to dispossess the Poles of a land which has been theirs for a thousand years. The chef d’oeuvre of this policy has been the work of the Imperial Colonization Commission, which in the last thirty years has spent over 500,000,000 marks in buying up property in the eastern provinces and settling German colonists upon it. Over 100,000 Germans have been brought in in this way. Half a dozen other official and semi-official organizations have been at work for the same purpose. In addition, the host of government functionaries and servants in these provinces, the administrative, judicial, financial, railroad, telegraph, postal, forest, school officials and employees, have been recruited almost exclusively from the Germans, and very largely from Germans brought in from the west by the promise of higher pay and other special privileges. It has been estimated that in the various districts of the east, from one-fifth to one-third of the German population is made up of those dependent for their livelihood upon the state—people brought in from outside or maintained for the sole purpose of impressing an artificial German character upon a Polish land. There is little reason to grieve very much over the prospect of seeing this more or less parasitical population faced with the alternative of submitting to the rule of the majority among which they live or else of returning to where they came from.
It is true, of course, that after making all such deductions, there will still remain in the provinces that have been or may be transferred to Poland, a much larger number of Germans than one would like to find there. But this is unavoidable. For centuries these territories have had a very mixed population. Old Poland opened her frontiers freely to German settlers, refraining from any effort to denationalize them, extending to them a tolerance, a liberality, a wide measure of local self-government which presents the most striking contrast to the treatment the Poles have received since the Germans have become the masters. As result of these earlier centuries, as well as of the work which the Prussian government has since carried on, the two races are everywhere intermingled. There are many German enclaves, towns and small districts of German majority embedded in the predominantly Polish areas. But how these ubiquitous German minorities and these isolated islands of German majority can be left to Germany without leaving a much larger number of Poles out of Poland, it is not easy to see. No large compact blocks of German population have been annexed to Poland. No territories have been awarded to Poland simply on the basis of historic rights. What the Peace Conference attempted to do was to disentangle two inextricably interlocked races, as far as that could be done; to define what might be considered—in spite of numerous German enclaves—the area of Polish majorities; and then to make the political boundary coincide with this ethnographic one, as far as was practicable. Since this ethnographic frontier presents an extraordinarily jagged and tortuous contour, some deviations from it had to be made in order to obtain a relatively straight and simple boundary; and naturally the effort was also made to avoid cutting railway lines too frequently. In spite of much that has been said, in the final delimitation of the frontier strategic interests were practically left out of consideration.
But what was most characteristic of the desire to be completely fair to the Germans is the fact that two large areas of incontestably Polish majority were not transferred to Poland, as they might well have been according to the Fourteen Points. Since there was a possibility of doubt as to the wishes of their populations, their fate has been left to popular vote.
The settlement is, on the whole, a pretty complicated one, too complicated perhaps. It deals in varying ways with six territories, each of which has its peculiarities and special problems, and each of which, for the sake of clearness, must be discussed separately.
Five-sixths of the old province of Posen has been ceded outright to Poland. Even the German delegates at Versailles did not very seriously contest the justice of this award. Posen was the cradle of the Polish race and of the Polish state; it belonged to Poland uninterruptedly down to the Second Partition in 1793; it has always retained a strong Polish majority; and that majority has furnished the most conclusive proof of its Polish patriotism and its detestation of German rule. Posen is entirely an agricultural province, the loss of which will reduce Germany’s ability to feed herself from her own resources, but will not otherwise cripple her seriously. The acquisition of the province will be a great gain to Poland, however, since the Posnanian Poles, in the struggle which they have carried on for thirty years against the Prussian government, have learned to equal or surpass the Germans in the qualities of industry, thrift, organizing ability, and general economic efficiency—qualities which are not too well developed among the other Poles.
In West Prussia the problem was much less simple. West Prussia holds a position of such pivotal importance that it has been for six hundred years a battleground between German and Slav. Polish down to the beginning of the fourteenth century; seized by the Teutonic Knights in 1308; voluntarily reunited to Poland in 1454; Polish down to 1772; annexed by Frederick the Great at the time of the First Partition—such is the outline of its history. For centuries the province has been the meeting-place, the point of collision, between two streams of colonization—the German current from west to east along the coast of the Baltic, and the Polish current from south to north down the valley of the Vistula. As a result, the ethnographic map of West Prussia is almost as intricate a mosaic as that of Macedonia. Nevertheless, the general result is clear. West Prussia tails into three zones. The zone along the western border is predominantly German; and so is the northeasterly part, on the right bank of the Vistula. But the central zone and the southeast are predominantly Polish. There thus exists to the west of the Vistula an unbroken corridor of Polish-speaking territory extending through to the Baltic. In the collision referred to between the two streams of colonization, the south to north movement has been the stronger. The Germans have not succeeded in bridging the gap between the old German lands of the west and the isolated German colony in East Prussia. This is the first and principal reason for the establishment of the much discussed Polish couloir to the Baltic.
Poland needs territorial access to the sea—of that there can be no question. But the Peace Conference would probably not have granted her this wish, had it not been justified in doing so on ethnographic grounds. The Conference did not invent the couloir: that already existed and is written plain on every honest linguistic map of this region. The Conference merely recognized the fact, and drew the necessary conclusion by awarding to Poland that middle zone of West Prussia, which forms a compact, though rather narrow, corridor through to the Baltic.
There has been much criticism of this decision, on the ground that East Prussia, most of which will still remain to Germany, is thereby separated from the rest of the Fatherland—an anomalous and unjust arrangement, it is said, which the Germans can never be expected to put up with. Certainly it would be an undesirable arrangement if there were any just way of avoiding it. But it may be remarked, in the first place, that this is the only solution of the problem that corresponds to the ethnographic situation, to the unhappy way in which Germans and Poles have come to be distributed here as the result of centuries of conflict. This solution merely restores the territorial situation that existed for three hundred years down to the time of the First Partition. Moreover, the continuity of German territory cannot be maintained without denying Poland access to the sea. Either East Prussia will have to trade with Germany across Polish territory or Poland will have to trade with the outside world across German territory. It is a question of balancing the respective interests at stake. And who will argue that the right of the million and a half Germans in East Prussia[46] to have a land connection with Germany (they will always have easy communication by sea) outweighs the right of over twenty million Poles in the hinterland to a secure access to the Baltic? Clearly the Polish interest involved is incomparably the greater and ought to take precedence. Every effort has been made in the Peace Treaty to assure untrammeled railway and trade communications between Germany and East Prussia across the intervening Polish territory. Further than that its seems unnecessary to go to secure the interests of the rather small, detached German colony around Königsberg.
The question of the Polish corridor is closely bound up with the thorny problem of Danzig.
Historically Danzig has in the main passed through the same vicissitudes as West Prussia, of which it is the capital. It is an old Polish city, transformed into a German-speaking one since the fourteenth century. Nevertheless, German Danzig distinguished itself in the past by its loyalty to Poland. It took the lead and fought gallantly to effect the reunion of West Prussia with Poland in the fifteenth century. During the ensuing period of Polish rule, it was prosperous and contented. The whole sea-borne trade of Poland passed through its hands; it ranked as wellnigh the first port of the Baltic; and the wide measure of autonomy which Poland allowed it drew Danzig to her by affection as well as by interest. It was not without staunch resistance that the city surrendered to the Prussian usurpation in 1793, and as late as 1813 the City Council besought the Powers of Europe to reunite Danzig to Poland and not to incorporate it with Prussia.
Today the problem of Danzig revolves around two essential facts. The city itself with a population of about 170,000, is overwhelmingly German (over 90%), and so is the small district immediately surrounding it.[47] On the other hand, economically and geographically, Danzig belongs to Poland.
The city derives its importance almost wholly from the fact that it is the natural port of the Vistula valley: it is to that river what Marseilles is to the Rhone or Alexandria to the Nile.[48] Supremely prosperous during the best days of its union with Poland, Danzig has decayed and stagnated under Prussian rule. It has sunk to be a third-rate port, far outdistanced by Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin, or even Königsberg. It is doubtful whether it would have any future at all, if it were left as a German city, almost surrounded by Polish territory and cut off by political and economic barriers from the hinterland on which its life depends.
For Poland this is almost the most crucial of all questions. Poland is essentially the valley of the Vistula. That river has always been the main artery of the country’s economic life, and scarcely any other European nation has its settlements concentrated in one river valley in like degree. The Vistula is a magnificent river system, a basin of 60,000 square miles with 3100 miles of navigable streams, and a possibility of opening good and easy connections with the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Niemen—i.e., with half of eastern Europe. But the utilization and proper development of this unique system of transcontinental waterways by Poland depends on her control of the great port at the mouth of the Vistula. Moreover, Danzig is not only the natural outlet to the sea for this whole country, but it is the only outlet that is in any sense available. The narrow strip of coast which Poland has received to the west of Danzig contains no real ports, and it is doubtful whether any satisfactory port can be developed there.
It has, of course, been suggested that even if Danzig were left Germany, Poland could enjoy free use of the port by special commercial treaties guaranteed by the League of Nations. But on this very question Poland has had such sad experiences of the way in which Germany keeps treaties that she cannot rely on such arrangements. And whatever may be one’s hopes as to the League of Nations, in the present state of the League it is scarcely fair to ask a nation to stake its most vital interests upon the efficiency of such a guarantee.
It is well known that the Danzig question led to something of a contest at Paris. On the one hand, Poland had received the promise of a free and secure access to the sea; on the other hand, it was difficult to transfer to her outright the Danzig territory with a solid population of about 300,000 Germans. Finally a compromise was agreed upon, a solution intended to safeguard both the national rights of the Danzig Germans and the economic interests of Poland.
According to the new arrangement, Danzig and its territory are to be entirely separated from Germany and to be organized as a free city under the protection of the League of Nations. In economic matters, however, this small republic will be very closely connected with Poland through a treaty to be drawn up by the Allied and Associated Powers. This treaty will have for its object to include the Free City within the Polish customs area, and to insure to Poland complete control over the railways, posts, telegraph lines, waterways, and port facilities of Danzig.
If this arrangement is honestly put into practice, it will restore substantially the relation which existed so happily between Poland and Danzig from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for Danzig was at that time virtually a free city under the protectorate of Poland. This historical precedent has helped a good deal to reconcile the Poles to the compromise, and there is reason to think that a considerable section of the Danzigers are rather well satisfied with it.
Posen, part of West Prussia, and the Danzig territory are the only regions which Germany has definitively lost to Poland. There are, however, three other territories which Germany may lose, since in all of them plebiscites are to be held to determine whether their inhabitants wish to remain with Germany or to be united with Poland.
The first of these plebiscite areas is the Marienwerder district on the right bank of the Vistula in the northeastern corner of West Prussia. This small territory is of much importance to Poland, since it borders upon the Vistula and, if left in German hands, might menace the security of communications along that river. Moreover, the most direct and convenient railway from Danzig to Warsaw runs across this territory. Nevertheless, since the district contained in 1910 about 114,000 Germans as against only 24,000 Poles, the Conference decided to refer its fate to a plebiscite. Apart from Danzig, this is the only considerable district with a German-speaking majority which may be taken away from Germany.
A plebiscite is also to be held in the southern zone of the province of East Prussia, in the territory commonly known as Mazuria. This secluded region of forests, lakes, and marshes has a decided majority of Polish-speaking population. The ancestors of these Poles were called into the country in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Teutonic Knights to replace the original Prussian population, which the Knights had largely exterminated. The Mazurian Poles have remained politically separated from the rest of their nation for six hundred years; since the sixteenth century they have become Protestants, while almost all the other Poles are Catholics; and because of these facts and also because of their economic, intellectual, and spiritual dependence on their German landlords, teachers, and pastors, the Mazurian Poles have long been completely estranged from the rest of the Polish nation. They have on the whole shown no very marked signs of Polish national consciousness, and there was room to doubt whether they desired reunion with Poland. Hence, a plebiscite was clearly in order here.
The third plebiscite area is in Upper Silesia. In this case, likewise, there was an indisputable Polish-speaking majority: 65.6% of Poles for the region as a whole, and in many districts 80 or even 90%. So strong was the Polish claim that the original decision of the Peace Conference was to award Upper Silesia to Poland outright. It is well known, however, that, as a result of the vehement objections raised by the German delegation at Versailles, this decision was ultimately modified. The territory in question was extraordinarily rich in minerals and important industrially. In the period just before the outbreak of the War, its coal production was 44,000,000 tons a year—three times as great as that of the Saar basin, 23% of Germany’s total output of coal. It also furnished 34% of her production of lead ore; and 81% of her zinc. The loss of so immensely valuable a territory would mean a severe blow to the economical life, as well as to the pride, of the German people. It was a sacrifice that could be fairly demanded only if the majority of the population in Upper Silesia clearly and unmistakably desired union with Poland. As to the wishes of that population, the evidence available was strongly in favor of Polish claims, but it was not absolutely conclusive. Hence the Conference finally resolved that in so grave a matter the decision must be left in the hands of the people themselves through a plebiscite.
To sum up, Germany has definitively lost about 17,500 square miles of territory and about 2,900,000 subjects. If all the plebiscites go against her, her total losses in the east will amount to an area of about 27,500 square miles and a total population of nearly 5,800,000. In other words, she risks losing in the east an area five times as great as Alsace-Lorraine, and a population three times as great.
There is no denying that this is serious business. The Powers who have decreed and sponsored these arrangements have thereby assumed responsibilities and liabilities, the gravity of which ought not to be overlooked or minimized. There is a common belief in Germany (though a wrong one) that Prussia has never permanently lost any territory she has once held, and that after every Jena comes a Leipzig or a Waterloo. And what must be the feeling of true-blue Prussians over the loss of these ‘Eastern Marches’ on the maintenance of which, Prince von Bülow was wont to declare, “the fate of Prussia, of the empire, nay of the whole German nation depends”? The resulting dangers to the peace of Europe are obvious. But it should not be imagined that these dangers would have been avoided, or even much reduced, if the Allies had demanded less for Poland. Without a far greater change in German mentality than we have had any evidence of as yet, any territorial cessions at all in favor of the despised Poles were sure to be fiercely resented. Even Professor Delbrück, one of the most moderate of Prussian politicians, declared years ago, “All Germany would have to be hewn in pieces before we would allow even Posen to be taken away from us.” The Paris Conference was always faced by the dilemma that ‘the peace of reconciliation,’ of which the Germans talked, would have been one that left Germany intact, unpunished, and impenitent; while the peace of justice, demanded by the principles which the Allies had proclaimed, raised the vision of an embittered Germany thirsting and plotting for revenge.
At all events, one may rejoice in the fact that, in spite of the risks involved, the Peace Conference had the courage to carry through a Polish-German settlement based on principle and not upon expediency or selfish convenience, a settlement which, in Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase, “leaves Germany no just grievance,” and which does right a great wrong from which the conscience of Europe has suffered for one hundred and fifty years.
Turning to the territories that belonged to the late Hapsburg monarchy, we may note that Poland has had an unhappy dispute with Czecho-Slovakia over the duchy of Teschen and the small territories of Zips and Arva, which lie south of the Carpathians. After two weeks of fighting and nine months of negotiation, it has now been settled that the populations of these districts are to decide by plebiscite to which of the two new republics they wish to belong.
Much more serious and difficult has been the problem presented by Galicia. The western part of this province was from the earliest times an integral part of Poland and is overwhelmingly Polish today. There is no real question here, and the possession of Western Galicia has already been assured to Poland. But with the remaining two-thirds of the province, the case is altogether different.
Eastern Galicia was originally settled by a population historically known, and still commonly known as Ruthenians. They are a branch of that Little Russian race for which the general name Ukrainian is now coming into use. After belonging to various Ruthenian principalities in the early middle ages, Eastern Galicia was conquered by Poland in 1340; it remained a part of the Polish state down to 1772; and even under the Austrian rule the Poles have continued to be the dominant nation. Today the ethnographic situation in Eastern Galicia may be summarized by saying that the Ruthenians make up 59% of the total population, the Poles 27%, and the Jews 13%. Although usually in the minority, the Poles are found in large numbers in almost every part of the territory. Lemberg, the capital of the province, and most of the other large towns are mainly Polish and Jewish in population; and there are several large rural districts of Polish-speaking majority.
Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers, doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians; 17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1% of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23% of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically, and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.
During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years. It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair, secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for the latter were always the enemy for Berlin, and decades before Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the ‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both Russia and Poland.
Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective, both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant, and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific. For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern Galicia with Russia.
For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate of Eastern Galicia.
At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and, with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army, attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919, the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole country as far as the Zbrucz.
The fate of Eastern Galicia was thus more or less settled vi et armis, without the Conference and at times to the lively displeasure of the Conference. That the Allied and Associated Powers nevertheless finally sanctioned the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia and are now apparently intending to place that country, provisionally at least, under the sovereignty of Poland, is a fact which has called forth no little criticism. It has been denounced as a craven surrender in the face of a fait accompli, a betrayal of principle, the sacrifice of three and a half million Ukrainians to the ravenous Polish imperialists, and much more to the like effect.
The chief justification of the Conference, I think, is to be found in the hard facts of the situation. The Ruthenians are indeed the majority in Eastern Galicia; the majority ought to rule; but it was very difficult to apply this principle in this particular case.
The Ruthenian majority was not at all agreed as to what it wanted. The Ukrainophiles among them were for an independent Ukrainian state; but the other party was altogether opposed to such an idea. This second party, however, had no more practicable program to offer than that the Allied governments should occupy and administer Eastern Galicia until such time as Russia was on her feet again and in condition to take over the country. If one might judge from the relative strength of the two Ruthenian parties as they existed before the war, the party which wanted an independent Ukrainian state might be a majority among the Ruthenians, but was only a minority in the total population.
It was rather doubtful, moreover, whether the Ruthenians were capable of taking over the government of the country. They had had no independent state for nearly six hundred years, and their national development had been so retarded and unsatisfactory that it was not easy to believe that they were fitted for independent statehood today. Where were the elements on which a solid state could be constructed? Such elements were not to be found in the ignorant and inarticulate masses of the peasants nor in the small class of intellectuals. These intellectuals had already given the measure of their ability: for six months they had tried to run a government, and the result—nearly all the many Allied officers who were sent in to study the situation were unanimous in the opinion that this Ukrainian government had been, to put it mildly, a sorry failure; and that the majority of the population—Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians alike—were relieved when this government collapsed and the Polish troops came in.
Eastern Galicia had been fought over for four years by Austrians and Russians, and then for a fifth year by Poles and Ukrainians. The country had suffered more than any other part of Eastern Europe. The Conference was anxious to assure to this war-racked and desolated region a return to orderly government and stable conditions as quickly as possible. This could not be effected by handing back the country to the local Ukrainian politicians, who had tried and failed; nor by handing it over to the so-called Republic of the Great Ukraine, represented only by the will-o’-the wisp government of the peripatetic Petlura. The Russian solution was practically out of the question for the present. The plan of international occupation and administration was indeed discussed, but none of the powers felt able or willing to undertake such a burden in that remote and inaccessible corner of Eastern Europe. Hence, the only practical solution seemed to be to entrust the Poles with the occupation and administration of the country, subject to certain guarantees to be stipulated in favor of the Ruthenians. The country had belonged to Poland for four hundred years; the Poles were politically and economically the most active, experienced, and capable element of the population; they were actually in possession of the country; and their occupation seemed to meet with the rather general approval of the inhabitants.
The final settlement of this question has not yet been made, however. There have been long negotiations between the Allies and the Polish government as to the terms under which Poland may be entrusted with the administration of Eastern Galicia, the autonomy which that province is to enjoy, and the special guarantees for national rights to be insured to the Ruthenians. No definitive agreement has yet been reached.
The eastern frontier of Poland is also still undefined, for reasons already indicated. At any rate, the Polish armies are now occupying a very wide area in the east. A year ago the Bolshevik forces had advanced almost to the borders of Congress Poland: today, after a certain amount of fighting, the Poles have thrust them back almost to the Dnieper. The Poles are now in possession of most of the old Russian provinces of Grodno, Wilno, Minsk, and Volhynia: i. e., of a very large part of those eastern territories which belonged to the old Polish republic and which have been the object of an age-long dispute between Poland and Russia.
What the ultimate fate of these regions will be, it would be difficult to forecast. The various nationalist movements which have sprung up in this area are of such recent date and such uncertain strength, that it would require much boldness to prophesy the outcome. Will Lithuania, for instance, consolidate itself as an independent state, or renew its old federal union with Poland, or return to Russia? Will the Ukrainians unite once more with Russia or establish themselves as a new state of 40,000,000 people? What will become of the White Russians, of all the peoples in this region the most enigmatic? The western section of them, being Catholic, may perhaps gravitate towards Poland; the eastern section, being Orthodox, may perhaps cleave to the side of Russia. Or will they develop a national movement of their own? When and in what fashion will a reorganized Russia be able to reassert her voice effectively in these questions? Such are some of the uncertainties in the case.
At all events, for the time being the Poles are again in possession of a larger part of their ancient heritage, of the Poland that existed before the Partitions. They are in possession of territories which, taken together, must contain a population of over thirty millions. And whatever fluctuations may still take place in her frontiers, Poland is likely to remain the largest and in many respects the most important of the new states produced by the war, the sixth most populous state in Europe.
While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power, it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc, lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany—such are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.
The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:
“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle differentia which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]
On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.
Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years—all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe.