question. But the Peace Conference would probably not have granted
her this wish, had it not been justified in doing so on ethnographic
grounds. The Conference did not invent the couloir: that already
existed and is written plain on every honest linguistic map of this
region. The Conference merely recognized the fact, and drew the
necessary conclusion by awarding to Poland that middle zone of West
Prussia, which forms a compact, though rather narrow, corridor through
to the Baltic.
There has been much criticism of this decision, on the ground that
East Prussia, most of which will still remain to Germany, is thereby
separated from the rest of the Fatherland--an anomalous and unjust
arrangement, it is said, which the Germans can never be expected to
put up with. Certainly it would be an undesirable arrangement if
there were any just way of avoiding it. But it may be remarked, in
the first place, that this is the only solution of the problem that
corresponds to the ethnographic situation, to the unhappy way in which
Germans and Poles have come to be distributed here as the result of
centuries of conflict. This solution merely restores the territorial
situation that existed for three hundred years down to the time of
the First Partition. Moreover, the continuity of German territory
cannot be maintained without denying Poland access to the sea. Either
East Prussia will have to trade with Germany across Polish territory
or Poland will have to trade with the outside world across German
territory. It is a question of balancing the respective interests at
stake. And who will argue that the right of the million and a half
Germans in East Prussia[46] to have a land connection with Germany
(they will always have easy communication by sea) outweighs the right
of over twenty million Poles in the hinterland to a secure access to
the Baltic? Clearly the Polish interest involved is incomparably the
greater and ought to take precedence. Every effort has been made in the
Peace Treaty to assure untrammeled railway and trade communications
between Germany and East Prussia across the intervening Polish
territory. Further than that its seems unnecessary to go to secure the
interests of the rather small, detached German colony around Königsberg.
The question of the Polish corridor is closely bound up with the thorny
problem of Danzig.
Historically Danzig has in the main passed through the same
vicissitudes as West Prussia, of which it is the capital. It is an
old Polish city, transformed into a German-speaking one since the
fourteenth century. Nevertheless, German Danzig distinguished itself
in the past by its loyalty to Poland. It took the lead and fought
gallantly to effect the reunion of West Prussia with Poland in the
fifteenth century. During the ensuing period of Polish rule, it was
prosperous and contented. The whole sea-borne trade of Poland passed
through its hands; it ranked as wellnigh the first port of the Baltic;
and the wide measure of autonomy which Poland allowed it drew Danzig
to her by affection as well as by interest. It was not without staunch
resistance that the city surrendered to the Prussian usurpation in
1793, and as late as 1813 the City Council besought the Powers of
Europe to reunite Danzig to Poland and not to incorporate it with
Prussia.
Today the problem of Danzig revolves around two essential facts. The
city itself with a population of about 170,000, is overwhelmingly
German (over 90%), and so is the small district immediately surrounding
it.[47] On the other hand, economically and geographically, Danzig
belongs to Poland.
The city derives its importance almost wholly from the fact that it
is the natural port of the Vistula valley: it is to that river what
Marseilles is to the Rhone or Alexandria to the Nile.[48] Supremely
prosperous during the best days of its union with Poland, Danzig
has decayed and stagnated under Prussian rule. It has sunk to be a
third-rate port, far outdistanced by Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin, or even
Königsberg. It is doubtful whether it would have any future at all, if
it were left as a German city, almost surrounded by Polish territory
and cut off by political and economic barriers from the hinterland on
which its life depends.
For Poland this is almost the most crucial of all questions. Poland
is essentially the valley of the Vistula. That river has always been
the main artery of the country’s economic life, and scarcely any other
European nation has its settlements concentrated in one river valley
in like degree. The Vistula is a magnificent river system, a basin
of 60,000 square miles with 3100 miles of navigable streams, and a
possibility of opening good and easy connections with the Dnieper,
the Dniester, and the Niemen--i.e., with half of eastern Europe.
But the utilization and proper development of this unique system of
transcontinental waterways by Poland depends on her control of the
great port at the mouth of the Vistula. Moreover, Danzig is not only
the natural outlet to the sea for this whole country, but it is the
only outlet that is in any sense available. The narrow strip of coast
which Poland has received to the west of Danzig contains no real ports,
and it is doubtful whether any satisfactory port can be developed there.
It has, of course, been suggested that even if Danzig were left
Germany, Poland could enjoy free use of the port by special commercial
treaties guaranteed by the League of Nations. But on this very question
Poland has had such sad experiences of the way in which Germany keeps
treaties that she cannot rely on such arrangements. And whatever may
be one’s hopes as to the League of Nations, in the present state of
the League it is scarcely fair to ask a nation to stake its most vital
interests upon the efficiency of such a guarantee.
It is well known that the Danzig question led to something of a contest
at Paris. On the one hand, Poland had received the promise of a free
and secure access to the sea; on the other hand, it was difficult to
transfer to her outright the Danzig territory with a solid population
of about 300,000 Germans. Finally a compromise was agreed upon, a
solution intended to safeguard both the national rights of the Danzig
Germans and the economic interests of Poland.
According to the new arrangement, Danzig and its territory are to be
entirely separated from Germany and to be organized as a free city
under the protection of the League of Nations. In economic matters,
however, this small republic will be very closely connected with Poland
through a treaty to be drawn up by the Allied and Associated Powers.
This treaty will have for its object to include the Free City within
the Polish customs area, and to insure to Poland complete control over
the railways, posts, telegraph lines, waterways, and port facilities of
Danzig.
If this arrangement is honestly put into practice, it will restore
substantially the relation which existed so happily between Poland and
Danzig from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for Danzig was
at that time virtually a free city under the protectorate of Poland.
This historical precedent has helped a good deal to reconcile the Poles
to the compromise, and there is reason to think that a considerable
section of the Danzigers are rather well satisfied with it.
Posen, part of West Prussia, and the Danzig territory are the only
regions which Germany has definitively lost to Poland. There are,
however, three other territories which Germany may lose, since in
all of them plebiscites are to be held to determine whether their
inhabitants wish to remain with Germany or to be united with Poland.
The first of these plebiscite areas is the Marienwerder district on
the right bank of the Vistula in the northeastern corner of West
Prussia. This small territory is of much importance to Poland, since
it borders upon the Vistula and, if left in German hands, might menace
the security of communications along that river. Moreover, the most
direct and convenient railway from Danzig to Warsaw runs across this
territory. Nevertheless, since the district contained in 1910 about
114,000 Germans as against only 24,000 Poles, the Conference decided
to refer its fate to a plebiscite. Apart from Danzig, this is the only
considerable district with a German-speaking majority which may be
taken away from Germany.
A plebiscite is also to be held in the southern zone of the province
of East Prussia, in the territory commonly known as Mazuria. This
secluded region of forests, lakes, and marshes has a decided majority
of Polish-speaking population. The ancestors of these Poles were called
into the country in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the
Teutonic Knights to replace the original Prussian population, which
the Knights had largely exterminated. The Mazurian Poles have remained
politically separated from the rest of their nation for six hundred
years; since the sixteenth century they have become Protestants,
while almost all the other Poles are Catholics; and because of these
facts and also because of their economic, intellectual, and spiritual
dependence on their German landlords, teachers, and pastors, the
Mazurian Poles have long been completely estranged from the rest of the
Polish nation. They have on the whole shown no very marked signs of
Polish national consciousness, and there was room to doubt whether they
desired reunion with Poland. Hence, a plebiscite was clearly in order
here.
The third plebiscite area is in Upper Silesia. In this case, likewise,
there was an indisputable Polish-speaking majority: 65.6% of Poles for
the region as a whole, and in many districts 80 or even 90%. So strong
was the Polish claim that the original decision of the Peace Conference
was to award Upper Silesia to Poland outright. It is well known,
however, that, as a result of the vehement objections raised by the
German delegation at Versailles, this decision was ultimately modified.
The territory in question was extraordinarily rich in minerals and
important industrially. In the period just before the outbreak of the
War, its coal production was 44,000,000 tons a year--three times as
great as that of the Saar basin, 23% of Germany’s total output of coal.
It also furnished 34% of her production of lead ore; and 81% of her
zinc. The loss of so immensely valuable a territory would mean a severe
blow to the economical life, as well as to the pride, of the German
people. It was a sacrifice that could be fairly demanded only if the
majority of the population in Upper Silesia clearly and unmistakably
desired union with Poland. As to the wishes of that population, the
evidence available was strongly in favor of Polish claims, but it was
not absolutely conclusive. Hence the Conference finally resolved that
in so grave a matter the decision must be left in the hands of the
people themselves through a plebiscite.
To sum up, Germany has definitively lost about 17,500 square miles of
territory and about 2,900,000 subjects. If all the plebiscites go
against her, her total losses in the east will amount to an area of
about 27,500 square miles and a total population of nearly 5,800,000.
In other words, she risks losing in the east an area five times as
great as Alsace-Lorraine, and a population three times as great.
There is no denying that this is serious business. The Powers who
have decreed and sponsored these arrangements have thereby assumed
responsibilities and liabilities, the gravity of which ought not to be
overlooked or minimized. There is a common belief in Germany (though
a wrong one) that Prussia has never permanently lost any territory
she has once held, and that after every Jena comes a Leipzig or a
Waterloo. And what must be the feeling of true-blue Prussians over the
loss of these ‘Eastern Marches’ on the maintenance of which, Prince
von Bülow was wont to declare, “the fate of Prussia, of the empire,
nay of the whole German nation depends”? The resulting dangers to the
peace of Europe are obvious. But it should not be imagined that these
dangers would have been avoided, or even much reduced, if the Allies
had demanded less for Poland. Without a far greater change in German
mentality than we have had any evidence of as yet, any territorial
cessions at all in favor of the despised Poles were sure to be fiercely
resented. Even Professor Delbrück, one of the most moderate of Prussian
politicians, declared years ago, “All Germany would have to be hewn
in pieces before we would allow even Posen to be taken away from us.”
The Paris Conference was always faced by the dilemma that ‘the peace
of reconciliation,’ of which the Germans talked, would have been one
that left Germany intact, unpunished, and impenitent; while the peace
of justice, demanded by the principles which the Allies had proclaimed,
raised the vision of an embittered Germany thirsting and plotting for
revenge.
At all events, one may rejoice in the fact that, in spite of the risks
involved, the Peace Conference had the courage to carry through a
Polish-German settlement based on principle and not upon expediency or
selfish convenience, a settlement which, in Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase,
“leaves Germany no just grievance,” and which does right a great wrong
from which the conscience of Europe has suffered for one hundred and
fifty years.
* * * * *
Turning to the territories that belonged to the late Hapsburg monarchy,
we may note that Poland has had an unhappy dispute with Czecho-Slovakia
over the duchy of Teschen and the small territories of Zips and Arva,
which lie south of the Carpathians. After two weeks of fighting
and nine months of negotiation, it has now been settled that the
populations of these districts are to decide by plebiscite to which of
the two new republics they wish to belong.
Much more serious and difficult has been the problem presented by
Galicia. The western part of this province was from the earliest times
an integral part of Poland and is overwhelmingly Polish today. There
is no real question here, and the possession of Western Galicia has
already been assured to Poland. But with the remaining two-thirds of
the province, the case is altogether different.
Eastern Galicia was originally settled by a population historically
known, and still commonly known as Ruthenians. They are a branch of
that Little Russian race for which the general name Ukrainian is now
coming into use. After belonging to various Ruthenian principalities in
the early middle ages, Eastern Galicia was conquered by Poland in 1340;
it remained a part of the Polish state down to 1772; and even under
the Austrian rule the Poles have continued to be the dominant nation.
Today the ethnographic situation in Eastern Galicia may be summarized
by saying that the Ruthenians make up 59% of the total population, the
Poles 27%, and the Jews 13%. Although usually in the minority, the
Poles are found in large numbers in almost every part of the territory.
Lemberg, the capital of the province, and most of the other large towns
are mainly Polish and Jewish in population; and there are several large
rural districts of Polish-speaking majority.
Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between
the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant
population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers,
doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among
the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown
by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent
upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the
Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians;
17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1%
of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23%
of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically,
and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in
numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.
During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side
by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory
and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the
politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high
percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a
nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a
marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter
racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years.
It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a
character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian
government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against
each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the
traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years
the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair,
secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for
the latter were always _the_ enemy for Berlin, and decades before
Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the
‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both
Russia and Poland.
Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective,
both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant,
and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were
divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national
movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and
a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained
that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal
must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The
minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as
a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the
Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian
nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific.
For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern
Galicia with Russia.
For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against
itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and
direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and
then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate
of Eastern Galicia.
At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian
party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and,
with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army,
attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a
prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed
to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the
fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself
almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian
forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send
large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919,
the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole
country as far as the Zbrucz.
The fate of Eastern Galicia was thus more or less settled _vi et
armis_, without the Conference and at times to the lively displeasure
of the Conference. That the Allied and Associated Powers nevertheless
finally sanctioned the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia and are now
apparently intending to place that country, provisionally at least,
under the sovereignty of Poland, is a fact which has called forth
no little criticism. It has been denounced as a craven surrender in
the face of a _fait accompli_, a betrayal of principle, the sacrifice
of three and a half million Ukrainians to the ravenous Polish
imperialists, and much more to the like effect.
The chief justification of the Conference, I think, is to be found in
the hard facts of the situation. The Ruthenians are indeed the majority
in Eastern Galicia; the majority ought to rule; but it was very
difficult to apply this principle in this particular case.
The Ruthenian majority was not at all agreed as to what it wanted. The
Ukrainophiles among them were for an independent Ukrainian state; but
the other party was altogether opposed to such an idea. This second
party, however, had no more practicable program to offer than that the
Allied governments should occupy and administer Eastern Galicia until
such time as Russia was on her feet again and in condition to take
over the country. If one might judge from the relative strength of the
two Ruthenian parties as they existed before the war, the party which
wanted an independent Ukrainian state might be a majority among the
Ruthenians, but was only a minority in the total population.
It was rather doubtful, moreover, whether the Ruthenians were capable
of taking over the government of the country. They had had no
independent state for nearly six hundred years, and their national
development had been so retarded and unsatisfactory that it was not
easy to believe that they were fitted for independent statehood today.
Where were the elements on which a solid state could be constructed?
Such elements were not to be found in the ignorant and inarticulate
masses of the peasants nor in the small class of intellectuals. These
intellectuals had already given the measure of their ability: for six
months they had tried to run a government, and the result--nearly
all the many Allied officers who were sent in to study the situation
were unanimous in the opinion that this Ukrainian government had
been, to put it mildly, a sorry failure; and that the majority of the
population--Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians alike--were relieved when this
government collapsed and the Polish troops came in.
Eastern Galicia had been fought over for four years by Austrians and
Russians, and then for a fifth year by Poles and Ukrainians. The
country had suffered more than any other part of Eastern Europe. The
Conference was anxious to assure to this war-racked and desolated
region a return to orderly government and stable conditions as quickly
as possible. This could not be effected by handing back the country
to the local Ukrainian politicians, who had tried and failed; nor
by handing it over to the so-called Republic of the Great Ukraine,
represented only by the will-o’-the wisp government of the peripatetic
Petlura. The Russian solution was practically out of the question for
the present. The plan of international occupation and administration
was indeed discussed, but none of the powers felt able or willing
to undertake such a burden in that remote and inaccessible corner
of Eastern Europe. Hence, the only practical solution seemed to be
to entrust the Poles with the occupation and administration of the
country, subject to certain guarantees to be stipulated in favor of
the Ruthenians. The country had belonged to Poland for four hundred
years; the Poles were politically and economically the most active,
experienced, and capable element of the population; they were actually
in possession of the country; and their occupation seemed to meet with
the rather general approval of the inhabitants.
The final settlement of this question has not yet been made, however.
There have been long negotiations between the Allies and the Polish
government as to the terms under which Poland may be entrusted with the
administration of Eastern Galicia, the autonomy which that province is
to enjoy, and the special guarantees for national rights to be insured
to the Ruthenians. No definitive agreement has yet been reached.
* * * * *