PLIGHT OF RUSSIAN POLAND
Mr. Herbert Corey, writing from Berlin to the New York Globe, in the spring of 1915, declared that unless something was done the world would be horrified—if the world had not lost its capacity for horror—by the sufferings of the Poles. “Soon cholera will come to Poland. Famine is there now. Scarlet fever and typhoid and smallpox and enteric and typhus are old settlers.” The million now in utter want only live at all because “humanity has a wonderful capacity for adjustment to wretchedness.
“There are 6,000,000 Poles in the portion of Russian Poland that is being fought over. Of these, according to the Red Cross men, 1,000,000 are absolutely destitute. They are without food or the means to buy food. They are living on the charity of others who are but slightly better off. That charity must come to an end soon—because food is coming to an end. It is not merely that money is lacking. Flour is lacking. It must be imported or starvation follows.
“Russian Poland is a conspicuous example of Russian rule. No measure of self-government is permitted the people. All governing officials are appointed from Petrograd. Lodz, for example, a city which contains from 500,000 to 750,000 people—all statistics in Poland are mere guesses—is ruled by a mayor and four assistants, all sent out from Russia. No city may expend more than $150, American money, for its own purposes, except permission is secured from Petrograd. That permission is rarely given. Petrograd needs the taxes that Lodz pays. When permission is given it is long delayed. Therefore, Lodz, a town as large as St. Louis, has unpaved streets that are ankle-deep in mud in winter and ankle-deep in dust in summer. It has a privately owned and paid fire department that responds only to calls from its own clients. Ninety per cent of its residents live in sties on streets that are mere stenches.
“And yet Lodz is the second cotton-manufacturing town in Europe. It is excelled only by Manchester in its manufacturing totals. Isolated on the bleak plains of Poland, at a distance from a seaport, served by two railroads only, it is an anomaly in the commercial world.