The success of the French point of view has made the Polish republic a heterogeneous conglomeration of peoples, among whom the pure Poles have a bare majority. Aside from the millions of Germans, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Ukrainians, Poland contains the largest Jewish population in the world. The Jews in Poland are a separate people, tenacious of their language and customs, who would have furnished a serious enough internal political problem for the new republic had Poland been given her proper ethnographic frontiers. But, as the country is now constituted, the balance of power in the parliament is held by the Jewish and alien deputies. The folly of the attempt to found a Poland with universal suffrage in accordance with the French plan is demonstrated by the political confusion of the last four years. Poland was bound by the Minorities Treaty of June 28, 1919, to grant equality to all elements of the new state. The difficulties with the Jews were quite sufficient in themselves. But when millions of other peoples have been brought against their will into Poland, it is easily seen that the Polish Nationalists are having hard sledding.

The National Democratic party, comprising the landed gentry and the educated classes in general, who had led the independence movement, thought that it was their right to control the government. But from the beginning they had to contend with the peasant and labor and Socialist combination, which matched them in strength, and which could easily run the country by Jewish and German-Ukrainian support. Pilsudski, who retained for four years the transitional title of Chief of the State, insisted that no conservative Government could live in Poland. The natural majority was Socialist (with the peasant support), and any attempt to keep the Nationalists in the saddle, according to Pilsudski, would be futile.

The first General Election under the new constitution was held on November 5 and 12, 1922. Strenuous efforts were made in every part of the country to prevent the exercise of suffrage on the part of the new alien Minorities and the Jews. Despite intimidation and glaring fraud, the new Parliament did not contain a Nationalist majority. The Nationalist Right and the Populist-Socialist-Labor Left had about the same strength in both Diet and Senate, with a center group of Jews and “foreigners” holding the balance of power. The test came in the election of the first president of Poland. Pilsudski refused to run, not wanting to owe his election to the votes of Jews and Germans. Count Maurice Zamoyski, Polish minister in Paris, whose family had played a glorious rôle in Poland for centuries, was the candidate of the Right. The Left put up Professor Narutowicz, who had been living in exile at Zurich for many years, and who returned to Poland to become minister of foreign affairs after the resurrection. Zamoyski, idol of the Nationalists, was defeated.

Feeling ran high in Warsaw. For several days a pogrom was feared. Molested in the streets, the Jews took to cover. Had not the police behaved admirably there would have been serious loss of life and destruction of property. The worst offenders were not hooligans but students and older men of the so-called intelligentsia. General Haller, former commander of the Polish Corps in France during the war and later of the volunteer army that stemmed the Bolshevist advance in 1920, imprudently allowed himself to be drawn into the street manifestations. He addressed the students in an inflammatory manner, crying out that the Poles had been outvoted in their own country by Jews and foreigners. It was unthinkable, General Haller said, that a man like Zamoyski, who represented the noblest traditions of Poland, should have been defeated.

The new president, to prove that he was not under the control of the Left and the Jews, immediately asked the Right to form a new Government. Not only did the irritated Nationalists refuse this overture, but they absented themselves from the inauguration, and declared that they would abstain from participation in Parliament. The police had to take stringent measures to protect the members of the Diet and the representatives of foreign legations who appeared for the ceremony. The President was smuggled in. When the inauguration was over, the Nationalists formed barricades, and the police had to charge. The automobile of M. Narutowicz made slow progress back to the palace, and all along the way the first president of Poland was pelted with snow-balls and mud. Five days after he took the oath of office, he was assassinated. The crime was explained as the act of an insane man without accomplices, but there can be no doubt that it was prompted by the feeling aroused over the defeat of the Nationalist candidate.[13]

A strong revulsion of feeling followed this crime. It was realized that the very existence of Poland was at stake. General Sikorski, Chief of Staff, assumed the premiership, proclaimed the country in danger, and appealed to all parties to join in solving the crisis. Alarmed over the possibility that rioting in Warsaw might react unfavorably upon the morale of the army, Premier Sikorski was ready for strong measures. When parliament met again on December 20, and Stanislas Wojciechowski, the candidate of the Left and Center, was elected over Professor Morawski, of the University of Cracow, one of the leaders of the Right, the Nationalists decided to accept their defeat.

This sad experience was a demonstration of the old truth that you cannot keep your cake and eat it. Unless the elements other than Poles are barred from taking part in elections, the Polish Nationalists will never be able to get the Government into their hands. Half the Poles are supporters of agrarian reform or some kind or other of Socialism, and they place these issues above nationalism. In fact, the majority of the radicals abhor nationalism. They put class ahead of race interests. Greater Poland was a glorious dream, but its realization has meant the disillusionment of the dreamers. If Poland is to continue to exist as an independent state with its present boundaries, the landed gentry will have to abdicate their special privileges and become democratized, while the Polish Nationalists will have to abandon the notion that the privileges of Polish citizenship are the inherent right of those alone who speak the Polish language and glory in Polish traditions and culture.

CHAPTER XIII
THE CREATION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Of the new states created by the Paris treaties, Czechoslovakia has had the most uneventful existence and is by all odds the most flourishing. In fact, it is the only one of the Succession States to the Hapsburg Empire whose political and economic life is functioning normally. When one arrives in Prague, one is immediately struck with the naturalness of the new régime. It is as if it had always been. And when one goes to the Burg and visits the offices of the new Government, which has now been functioning under the control of the same men for nearly five years, there is no feeling of coming into contact with something parvenu or inchoate or absurd. Across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs workmen are busy on the cathedral. “When was this started?” I asked. “We have been working on this addition—in reality it is the main part of the cathedral, you know—for six hundred years.” Nothing illustrates better the spirit reigning to-day in Czechoslovakia. Freed from a bad dream, the old Kingdom of Bohemia is taking up once more the problem of playing an independent rôle in central Europe.