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.