“For two weeks Lodz had no bread at all. For months it has had no meat at all—so far as the poorer classes are concerned. During those two weeks the mass of the population lived on potatoes.
“Conditions were slightly worse in Czenstochow, the second city in Russian Poland. Here 90,000 people live. It has no street-lights. It has no attempt at street-paving. It has no sewers. It has no city water. It has no publicly maintained fire department, though a few of the merchants have a department of their own. It is pre-middle-ages in everything—morals, discomfort, filth, darkness, disease, death-rate. Cholera is there all the time. Most of its people exist in reeking hovels, smoke-filled when they can afford fires, wet and cold at other times.
“As the towns grow smaller, conditions grow worse.”
THREE TIMES A BATTLE-FIELD
If the war had not come, these people would have prospered after a fashion. Potatoes were plentiful, and they had few other wants. A woman earned thirty cents a day in the mills and a man three cents more. Children worked as soon as they were old enough. Sixty-five per cent are wholly illiterate. Then—
“Russia struck at Germany. The German armies invaded Poland in retaliation. They swept almost to Warsaw—and an invading army sweeps fairly clean. There were some things left when they passed over. They were driven back, and the Russian armies covered this territory—and they gleaned what was left. Then the Russians were driven back—sacking as they went—and the Germans covered the ground once more. Three times unhappy Poland has been fought over. It had little at the beginning. It has nothing now. For months Poland has been starving, not merely going hungry. That is a commonplace of war. Poles have been dying because they cannot get food.
UNABLE TO HELP HERSELF
“Poland is quite unable to help herself. Most of the mills—probably all of the mills—are owned by Russian and German and French capitalists. The banks are all branches of foreign institutions. These concerns are all conducted by resident managers. Some of the managers have—on their own responsibility—given their work people two and a half and three cents a day each for food. Some have added a trifle for the children also. But this has practically come to an end. The managers have exhausted their supply of cash. They cannot get more. There are no mails. The towns of Poland are each printing their own paper money—not by consent of the Russian bureaucrats, but in defiance of them—but this money circulates only within the town’s borders. It is highly improbable it will ever be redeemed in real money. Meanwhile the price of food commodities has risen fifty per cent in two months. By the time this reaches America the prices may have doubled.