(ii.) She passed a regulation that every Pole over 15 years of age must take out an annual passport. For this various sums were charged up to five roubles a head, and this tax probably produced about 1,000,000 roubles.
(iii.) She levied a land-tax, a personal property tax, and an “ordinary” tax, producing 34,000,000 roubles. (What the “ordinary” tax was, does not appear. Probably it was a tax on the right of individual existence.)
(iv.) She instituted additional taxes, i.e., stamp tax, dog tax, fire-arm tax, producing about 8,000,000 roubles.
(v.) She levied certain permanent monthly taxes on imports, etc.
(vi.) She insisted that sums due to Russian custom authorities from merchants in the occupied territory should be paid to her, otherwise the goods for which these duties were liable would be confiscated.
In fine, it was close on a year and a half after the occupation of Warsaw by the Germans that any sort of announcement was made by the Central Empires with regard to the constitution of Poland, and even when that came, as we shall see, the proposed national constitution was nothing more than an impotent conjugation of irreconcilable units who, incapable of legislation, could only quarrel among themselves. Here and there small local governments had been formed, as for instance at Lodz, where Hindenburg, in July, 1916, instituted the following:
(i.) A municipal board of ten members, two of whom were Poles, the rest Jews or Germans.
(ii.) A municipal council of thirty-six, of whom twelve were Poles, twelve Jews, and twelve Germans.
Such a body, it will be agreed, did not do much for local Polish autonomy, since the Jews in Poland were notoriously pro-German. But then Germany was not “out” for doing much for Polish autonomy. Her main object during the first year of her occupation was to mark time and to await the developments of her military and other operations in Russia. She wanted to avoid trouble with the Poles, to avoid any measures that should conceivably weaken her grip and strengthen that of Austria, and, perhaps above all, to avoid anything that should tend to throw the Poles back into sympathy with Russia, as her forcible annexation of the country, or her partitioning it again between herself and Austria would have done. Probably (for Russia at that date was a long way from being beaten) she thought she would be best employed in peaceful penetration, which facilitated business between the two countries.
She started a German Chamber of Commerce with its head-quarters at Warsaw, in order to encourage trade between Poland and Germany in a manner most profitable to the latter. Poles who wished to become members of it had first to give a guarantee of their German proclivities by subscribing to the War-Loan, or contracting for the German army; they then on payment of an annual subscription of 100 marks, could put their wares on the German market. That encouraged Poles to enter into relations with Germany, and Germany, entering into similar relations with Poland, flooded the country with hardware and other goods. She Germanized Warsaw, and a letter from a German resident there in 1916 proudly describes how every week it became more like a garrison town of the Fatherland. There was a government band which played in public, there were tennis clubs started, the population was vaccinated, a more sanitary drainage system was introduced, and many new German newspapers appeared. Vaccination and sporting clubs and drainage were, of course, amply looked after in Warsaw before, and this account is but part of Germany’s “make-up” as the deliverer of unhappy Poland from the barbarous conditions in which she had lived under Russian rule. Elsewhere, as at Bialystok, propagandist newspapers were printed in Polish, German and Yiddish[15] the latter for the sake of the large Jewish population there. There was a lack of bullion in Poland, for the Russians had broken into banks both there and in Galicia on their retreat, and had carried off what they could find, and so Germany introduced a worthless iron coinage, which obtained currency in a land wholly hemmed in by the armies of her and her allies. In order to confirm her grip she took over the administration of many Polish organizations, and closed others in order to withdraw the executive from native hands. This was not always a success, for, when in January, 1916, she closed the “Central Citizen Committee” in Warsaw, which regulated provisions, civic guard, Bureau for refugees, etc., the most abysmal confusion resulted, and she was forced to re-establish it again. But this time she put it in the hands of Count Ronikier, one of her most reliable partisans.