[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.