While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power, it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc, lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany—such are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.
The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:
“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle differentia which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]
On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.
Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years—all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe.
Bibliographical Note
One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable Geographic and Statistical Atlas of Poland, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued.
Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic, intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical information, in the works published during the War by the Committee for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published La petite Encyclopédie polonaise, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries, Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the larger Encyclopédie polonaise, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial development of Polish nationality—in four volumes), iii (economic life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto appeared.
A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the Annuaire statistique polonais by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow, 1917.
E. H. Lewinski-Corwin’s Political History of Poland, New York, 1917, is perhaps the best account of the subject available in English, although marred by a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration and party prejudice.