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.