fusion of Lithuania with Poland. History affords few stranger
spectacles than this process by which the much larger and originally
stronger state voluntarily submitted to being assimilated and absorbed
by the smaller one. That result was due to the attractions which the
more advanced civilization of Poland possessed for the upper classes
in the Lithuanian realm; to the desire of the Lithuanian noblesse
to secure the liberties and privileges of the Polish nobles; and to
the remarkable tact, cleverness, and perseverance with which for
centuries the Poles pursued the aim of binding their somewhat wayward
neighbor irrevocably to their side. The union between the two states,
originally based solely on the person of the common ruler, was steadily
strengthened until by the agreement of 1569 it was turned into a
permanent organic union--a partnership which was to last through good
days and through evil until the Partitions.
In this combined state the nobility and to a large extent the
bourgeoisie of the non-Polish races came spontaneously to adopt the
Polish language, customs, religion, nationality--became in fact
quite Polonized. The institutions of Lithuania were assimilated in
all respects to those of Poland; Polish culture became predominant
from Kiev to Wilno, from Livonia to the Carpathians--in short, this
composite and originally so heterogeneous state became essentially a
Polish one. Thus, by statesmanship and tenacity, by the higher culture
they could offer and the liberties they extended, the Polish race had
peaceably conquered a great empire in the east, a realm twice the size
of the modest Poland of the Piasts; and a vast field was opened up for
colonization and the extension of Polish nationality.
The hundred years of Russian rule since the Partitions and violent
attempts at Russification have by no means destroyed, although they
have in part impaired, the results of four centuries of Polonization in
the eastern territories. Even today, in Lithuania proper and in large
areas of White Russia and the western Ukraine, the country gentry and
the non-Jewish population of the towns are predominantly Polish; Wilno,
the ancient capital of Lithuania, is still almost as much a Polish city
as Warsaw; Polish colonies are thickly scattered about in the rural
districts; and socially, intellectually, and economically, the Poles
remain the most important element in the population.
It would probably be true to say that the average Pole has today, at
the back of his head, the feeling that his country is not merely the
modest area of ethnographic Poland, but the whole wide expanse of
historic Poland--Poland as it was in 1772, just before the Partitions.
This conception is based partly upon the principle that the Partitions,
as acts of lawless usurpation, could have no legal validity, so that
_de jure_ Poland still exists within her frontiers of 1772; partly
upon the view that the lands between the Carpathians, the Baltic,
the Dnieper, and the Dvina possess so high a degree of geographical,
economic, and cultural unity that they deserve to be considered as
one country. But above all, it is a matter of historic traditions, of
time-hallowed associations and sentiments, of deeply rooted habits
of thought. It would be difficult for Poles today to forget that for
centuries their race has been as much at home in Wilno, Mohylew, Minsk,
or Kamieniec, as in Cracow or Warsaw; and that half of the greatest
figures in Polish history have come from these eastern lands beyond
the pale of ethnographic Poland. Kosciuszko, their national hero, and
Mickiewicz, their national poet, were both from Lithuania. The two
men at the head of the Polish state in the past year, Pilsudski and
Paderewski, come, the one from Lithuania, the other from the Ukraine.
For generations Poland has spent an infinite amount of effort in
organizing and civilizing these eastern territories and in defending
them against Swedes and Muscovites, Turks and Tartars. Their churches
are full of the tombs of Polish heroes, and their fields are soaked in
Polish blood.
Moreover, one cannot ignore the feeling with which the present
generation looks back upon the Polish state of the fourteenth to
the eighteenth centuries. For most outsiders the Partitions have
overshadowed all the preceding period of Polish history. Such observers
have fastened their eyes too exclusively upon the deplorable conditions
into which Poland had fallen just before her dismemberment, and have
concluded that her history is chiefly made up of a tissue of mistakes,
sins, and follies, interesting only as furnishing a terrible example
of how a state ought not to be governed and of how badly a people can
mismanage its national life. But the Poles, while conscious enough of
the mistakes in question, point out that their decadent period of a
hundred years or so just before the Partitions ought not to obscure
or outweigh the record of the three glorious centuries preceding the
decline; and in that earlier better period they find much reason for
cherishing feelings of pride, veneration, and piety towards that old
republic which has been so much condemned and so much misunderstood.
And there is much to justify such an attitude.
The old Polish state was an experiment of a highly original and
interesting character. It was a republic both in name and in fact,
although nominally it had a king as its first magistrate. It was
the largest and most ambitious experiment with a republican form of
government that the world had seen since the days of the Romans.
Moreover, it was the first experiment on a large scale with a federal
republic down to the appearance of the United States. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries this republic was the freest state in Europe,
the state in which the greatest degree of constitutional, civic, and
intellectual liberty prevailed. In an age of religious persecution and
chronic religious wars, Poland knew no such troubles; it offered almost
complete toleration and an asylum to those fleeing from persecution in
all western lands. Like the United States today, Poland was at that
time the melting-pot of Europe, the haven for the poor and oppressed
of all the neighboring countries--Germans, Jews, Czechs, Magyars,
Armenians, Tartars, Russians, and others. The complications of the
nationality problem in Poland today are due in no small measure to
the great numbers of aliens who here found a refuge from political
and religious persecution. Finally, the old republic represented an
effort to organize the vast open plain between the Baltic and the
Black Sea--a region containing so many weak and undeveloped races
and a region so much exposed to Germanic ambitions on the one side
and to Turco-Tartar onslaughts on the other side--into a compact and
powerful realm, which was directed indeed by the strongest and most
advanced race within its borders--the Poles--but which in its better
period allowed a genuine equality to the other races and extensive
self-government to some of them.
A great enthusiasm for freedom in almost every branch of life; the
principle of the sovereignty of the nation, calling the citizens to
participate in the responsibilities of government; the conception of
the state as not a thing existing for itself, but as an instrument
serving the wellbeing of society; aversion to absolute monarchy,
standing armies, and militarism; disinclination to undertake
aggressive wars, but a remarkable tendency to form voluntary unions
with neighboring peoples--such are some of the hallmarks of the old
Polish state, which make it stand out as a unique exception among the
rapacious and militaristic monarchies of that age. The Poles have
been only too frequently reproached for having created such a state
and for not having imitated the institutions and the spirit of their
neighbors; but today, after a war in which Prussia symbolized precisely
the principles which Poland is blamed for not having adopted, and the
Allies have stood for ideals closely akin to those of old Poland, it
would seem that the time has come for a revision of our judgments about
the old Polish republic.
For some such reasons the Poles today, while recognizing the many
blemishes that crept into the republic, particularly in its later
period, are still inclined to hold that this Polish-Lithuanian-White
Russian-Ukrainian-Prussian federation--which the old republic really
was--represented a political organization so entirely adapted to the
needs of that part of Europe, so much in the nature of things, that
its violent disruption at the hands of its neighbors must be a matter
of regret, and its restoration, in part, at least, on some twentieth
century basis a goal to be kept in view.
Since the Partitions the situation has, of course, been very
substantially modified. The partitioning governments have not labored
in vain to break down or destroy Polish influences in many parts of the
former republic; and in recent decades strong nationalist movements
have also grown up among two of the races once united to Poland, the
Lithuanians and the Ukrainians. Hence no one in Poland today believes
it possible or desirable simply to incorporate all the lands of the old
republic in the new Polish state. No one proposes to compel the other
races which have developed pronounced nationalist movements to unite
with Poland against their will.
But it is, I think, the general desire of the Poles to save as much
of their ancient heritage as can legitimately be done. Most of them
seem to feel that those eastern territories of the old republic in
which Polish culture is still predominant, and in which there is no
indigenous nationalist movement, ought to return to Poland. Many Poles
hope that the Lithuanians and possibly even the Ukrainians can be won
over to voluntarily accepting a federal union with Poland. Doubtless
this federal idea lies behind the demand recently presented to the
Bolsheviki by the Polish government: the demand that Soviet Russia
should renounce its claim to all territories west of the old Polish
frontiers of 1772. Ever since 1863, at least, it has been a favorite
thesis of Polish democrats and even Socialists that the only way to
effect a solution of the problem of the debatable eastern territories,
in accordance both with outraged legality and with the principle of
national self-determination, is to force Russia to renounce what she
usurped at the time of the Partitions, and then to leave the liberated
populations free either to renew their historic federal union with
Poland or to make any other political arrangements that they choose.
There is no need to pass judgment here upon the justice or expediency
of such ideas. But they cannot be ignored; and it certainly does not
advance us toward a solution of these questions, nor is it a sign
of insight or fair-mindedness, to brand these ideas as due simply
to ‘Polish imperialism’ or ‘chauvinism’ or ‘megalomania,’ as our
Liberal journals are fond of doing; or to castigate the Poles for
claiming a single mile of territory outside the area where--according
to the statistics prepared by governments hostile to them--there is
demonstrably a Polish-speaking majority. No nation with a thousand
years of history behind it could be expected to rise to such heights of
self-abnegation.
The wide dispersion of the Polish race, the divergence between what is
ethnically Polish today and what was historically, and still is in part
culturally, Polish; the lack of adequate data as to the ethnic makeup
and political gravitation of so many of the border populations; the
lack of clear-cut, natural frontiers--such are some of the difficulties
in the way of defining Poland’s proper boundaries.
* * * * *
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.
The settlement is, on the whole, a pretty complicated one, too
complicated perhaps. It deals in varying ways with six territories,
each of which has its peculiarities and special problems, and each of
which, for the sake of clearness, must be discussed separately.
Five-sixths of the old province of Posen has been ceded outright to
Poland. Even the German delegates at Versailles did not very seriously
contest the justice of this award. Posen was the cradle of the Polish
race and of the Polish state; it belonged to Poland uninterruptedly
down to the Second Partition in 1793; it has always retained a strong
Polish majority; and that majority has furnished the most conclusive
proof of its Polish patriotism and its detestation of German rule.
Posen is entirely an agricultural province, the loss of which will
reduce Germany’s ability to feed herself from her own resources, but
will not otherwise cripple her seriously. The acquisition of the
province will be a great gain to Poland, however, since the Posnanian
Poles, in the struggle which they have carried on for thirty years
against the Prussian government, have learned to equal or surpass the
Germans in the qualities of industry, thrift, organizing ability, and
general economic efficiency--qualities which are not too well developed
among the other Poles.
In West Prussia the problem was much less simple. West Prussia holds a
position of such pivotal importance that it has been for six hundred
years a battleground between German and Slav. Polish down to the
beginning of the fourteenth century; seized by the Teutonic Knights
in 1308; voluntarily reunited to Poland in 1454; Polish down to 1772;
annexed by Frederick the Great at the time of the First Partition--such
is the outline of its history. For centuries the province has been
the meeting-place, the point of collision, between two streams of
colonization--the German current from west to east along the coast of
the Baltic, and the Polish current from south to north down the valley
of the Vistula. As a result, the ethnographic map of West Prussia is
almost as intricate a mosaic as that of Macedonia. Nevertheless, the
general result is clear. West Prussia tails into three zones. The
zone along the western border is predominantly German; and so is the
northeasterly part, on the right bank of the Vistula. But the central
zone and the southeast are predominantly Polish. There thus exists
to the west of the Vistula an unbroken corridor of Polish-speaking
territory extending through to the Baltic. In the collision referred to
between the two streams of colonization, the south to north movement
has been the stronger. The Germans have not succeeded in bridging the
gap between the old German lands of the west and the isolated German
colony in East Prussia. This is the first and principal reason for the
establishment of the much discussed Polish couloir to the Baltic.