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.