The proclamation of Polish independence by the Germans on 5 November 1916 was at once repudiated by the principal Allies, with the single exception of Italy1 The last act of France on the eve of the Tsar's collapse was a Note from Briand (French Foreign Minister) to Isvolsky (Russian Ambassador in Paris) assuring the latter that
' Le Gouvernement de la République . . . reconnait â la Russie la complète liberté de fixer à son gré ses frontières occidentales.'
The Note was dated 11 March 1917. Before Isvolsky's despatch forwarding it to his Government reached Petrograd, the revolution had broken out, and the despatch was opened by Miliukoff, Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government.
1 Italy was the first to recognize the restoration of Poland as a war aim, by a resolution in the Chamber of Deputies on 7 December 1915.
Nevertheless, two years later Clémenceau, in forwarding the Polish Minorities Treaty of 28 June 1919 to Paderewski for signature, could write :
' In this connection I must further remind you that it is to the endeavours and sacrifices of the
Powers in whose name I am addressing you that the Polish nation owes the recovery of its independence. It is by their decision [ . . . etc.]
So presumably the endeavours and sacrifices of the Allies for Poland began after 11 March 1917—perhaps on 12 March 1917.
As against the humiliation conveyed with more than Prussian frankness in the second of these French Notes the legend of Pi&322;sudski and the Legions was the only offset : and the moral effect of it as such can hardly be exaggerated. Something at least had been done by Poland of her own initiative, by her own effort, on her own soil, to deserve her liberty ; and this was felt without question by all Poles of whatever party, with the exception always of the émigr&eactue;s in Paris who alone had the ear of the Allies. When Pi&322;sudski arrived in Warsaw from the fortress of which the Germans had interned him, the Heads of State in the person of the three Regents (the Cardinal Archbishop, a pro-Russian Polish Prince, and a big land-owner) were in waiting at the railway station in order at once to surrender into his hands the supreme power.
I met in London in 1917 one of the members of the present Polish Ministry, and of several previous
Ministries, whom in the conspiratorial manner I will designate only by the mysterious letter � Z �. Z was living in cheap lodgings near the British Museum, trying to make propaganda for Pi&322;sudski with the Poles in England, and going in daily apprehension of arrest at the hands of the British Foreign Office.1 I was collecting material for a book about the Legions—no easy task, for nothing was allowed to appear about them in the English Press. I quoted to Z what Napoleon said of his own Polish Legion in a certain connection : � C�est un geste bien polonais !� � ' Ah !� said z, � I�m glad you see that. Un geste bien polonais! Yes, and hanging around the ante-rooms of likely winners in this war is un geste bien juif.�
1 In the end he left England without having been arrested. The British authorities, though they took their Polish information—what there was of it—exclusively from National Democrat (i.e. anti-Piłsudskian) sources, did not on the whole allow their policy—what there was of it—to be dictated from this quarter. It was otherwise in France, where a round half-dozen of subsequent Polish Premiers or Ministers and one President of the Republic (Wojciechowski) were imprisoned or expelled at Russian, or pro-Russian Polish, instigation. Wojciechowski�s first reception of the French Ambassador must have been an interesting experience for both parties !
Are blood and iron the only ingredients of which national unity can be smelted ? The German and American examples in the nineteenth century seem to say yes. The shocks which German unity has
successfully withstood since 1918 are the best proof of the strength and fineness of Bismarck�s forging. Italian unity, which was not made of blood and iron alone, has had to be remade during the last ten years in stronger, though coarser, quality. If was is to disappear from the world, some other form of crucible must be found for new nations seeking to covert their nascent nationality into the steel of national unity . . . or alternatively, as in the Middle Ages, there must be no more nations. � No one can give liberty,� Piłsudski once wrote in a proclamation to the first Brigade of the legions : � liberty has to be taken by force.� But Poland as a whole has not been through this mill : and of the disappearance of the national idea in Eastern Europe there are not many signs !
All the indiscipline which brought the old Poland to its end has reappeared. The Diet has reproduced all the features which its enemies foretold before it came into being. When the invading bolshevists were within gun-range of Warsaw in 1920, the parties of the Right began feverishly to organize civil was in Western Poland in order to get rid of Piłsudski. All in the historic Polish tradition ! Nothing has been learnt and nothing forgotten. Poznania (the former Prussian [i.e. German] Poland), which is a hundred years ahead of the rest of the country, is sedulously excluded from all share in the Government, and stands aside sullenly, biding her time.
the agrarian problem has not been solved ; and every single one of the minority races is in more or less undisguised revolt against the existing regime, and held down only by the use of armed force in a manner which revolts every dispassionate foreign observer on the spot.
The following is the history of the agrarian problem since the Restoration. An Agrarian Reform Law was passed in 1919, but remained a dead letter for a year till 15 August 1920, when the peasant premier, Witos, introduced a second reform. The new law divided up all landed property in Poland into seven categories as follows :
(1) State domains ;
(2) estates belonging to members of ex-dynasties (Romanoff, Hapsburg, Hohenzollern) ;
(3) properties belong to the Russian Land Bank and the Prussian Expropriation Commission ;
(4) Church lands ;
(5) land belonging to public bodies ;
(6) land � administered contrary to economic or national inter4ests � ;
(7) other privately owned land.
Category 1 was to be expropriated first : then category 2 : and so on. It was obviously going to be some time before the reform reached category 7.
The Witos ministry fell immediately after passing this law, and the execution of the agrarian reform languished. In 1920 some 181,300 acres were expropriated ; in 1921-2 rather more. In the spring of 1923 Witos returned to power in � unholy coalition � with the Right, whose consent to the enforcement of the agrarian reform he had failed to obtain. When he endeavoured to make a beginning with the expropriation of the Church lands (category 4), the Vatican protested and the Government fell. It was not until two years later that a law was passed (28 December 1925) t o accelerate progress. Four hundred and ninety thousand acres were to be expropriated each year. In the autumn of the following year (October 1926) Piłsudski met the representatives of the big land-owners at the castle of Prince Janusz Radziwill at Nieswiez, and a tacit arrangement was reached by which, in return for the political support of the land-owners at the elections in the coming spring, Piłsudski agreed to mitigate the application of the agrarian reform. It is very difficult to obtain any figures as to what has happened to the agrarian reform since that date : but down to the end of 1927 some 2,464,000 acres in all had been expropriated, of which 1,602,000 went to create new holdings and 1,087,000 to the enlargement of existing holdings. The remainder went to � special purposes � (mainly co-operative undertakings) or were � returned � to the original owners.
It is estimated that there were some 50,000 families of landless agricultural labourers in Poland when the Germans proclaimed the restoration of Polish independence on 5 November 1916. Only 20 per cent of these have been given land since that date, and none of the m have been given enough to constitute � autonomous � holdings. In 1864 the landless agricultural labourers amounted to approximately one-third of the whole rural population—a dangerously high percentage. In 1932 the percentage is computed to be approximately the same. This is a record even worse than that of Hungary. The restored Poland has done less for the peasant in the decade following the Proclamation of November the Fifth than the Russians did in the decade after the Insurrection of 1863.1 Coelum nobilium, paradisus clericorum, aurifodina advenarum, infernum rusticorum was said of Poland in the old bad days. It is no longer true, of course, in the sense in which it was true in the eighteenth century. As an aurifodina advenarum in particular, it must be confessed, Poland has sadly lost ground. But so far as the last part of the saying
is concerned, though serfage is no more and the szlachta are no longer lords undisputed of the countryside, the new Poland is still in a sense a � hell � for the peasant. What is hell but deprivation of heaven ? The peasant is not yet allowed to enter into the heaven of the new Poland.
1 Nine hundred and seventeen thousand new peasant holdings were created in Russian Poland by the Russian Government in the eight years, 1864-72. Seventy-one thousand new holdings were created under the agrarian reform in the eight years 1919-27. The Russian reform was stultified by the growth of the population. In the first generation the holdings had been divided up to the extreme minimum allowed by the law (8� acres).
The minorities in Poland are a problem sui generis, to which even Czechoslovakia affords no parallel. . .&nbps;. But, just as in Czechoslovakia the percentage of the German minority is no indication of their relative strength or significance, so in Poland the percentage of the Jews is no indication of the social problem which they represent. Though they amount to less that 10 per cent of the total population (because the
total population includes the peasants, and no Jews are peasants) the story in the towns is very different. The following are the percentages in some of the larger Polish towns :
[ Warsaw 40 % / Lódz 23 % / Lublin 51 % / Suwalki 52 % / Siedlice 55 % / Radom 40 % / Płock 43 % ]
In certain trades the percentage of Jews is computed to be over 90 per center, e.g. in the [ grain trade 94 % / leather trade 93 % / peddling trade (a very important distributing trade in Poland) 91 % ].
On the other hand, scarcely any Jews are to be found in the heavy industries :
[ Potteries 0.6 % / Railways 2.1 % / Mines 0.7 % / Agriculture 0.0 % ].
As to the professions, here are some figures :
[ Doctors 24 % / Authors 14.6 % / Students 45 % / Beggars 30 % / Prostitutes 27 % / Municipal officials 5 % ].
It is estimated that four-fifths of the national capital (other than land) is in their hands.
The exactitude of some of the above figures is obviously qu4stionable : but the general picture which they give of the extent to which the Jews control the internal trade of the country is substantially accurate. Their power is even greater than the figures indicate. They have covered the country with an occult network, none the less powerful that it is unorganized, against which no Chamber of Commerce can for a moment contend. Against the co-operative movement, normally the Jew�s worst enemy in Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Kingdom (the former Russian Poland) have plenty of weapons. They can open a shop next door to the co-operative store and undercut the latter�s prices by 50 per cent : they can give credit to the peasant on condition of his buying at their shop : and at all times and in all places they can bribe the local officials. It is only in Poznania (the former Prussian [i.e. German] Poland), where the co-operative movement has been taken
up by the priests, that the Jew cannot stand against it. The percentage of Jews in Poznania has been steadily reduced as a result of the growth of the co-operative movement—a movement closely bound up with the political resistance to the Prussian policy of Germanization—until it is now [1932 ] as low as 1.3 per cent.
Apart from a very small (and apparently decreasing1) number of very rich Jews who would like to be regarded as Poles first and Jews afterwards, the Jews in Poland speak a different language, wear a different dress, eat different food, go to different schools and sue in different Courts from their Gentile compatriots. Here is a minority problem such as no other of the Succession States has to contend with.
1 The sons of � assimilators �, as these rich Jews are called, tend to rally to the Zionist movement.
Are they at least Polonophil ? It is difficult to say : but it is certain that in the winter of 1919, when the Ukrainians made their last desperate stand against the Poles, the Jews took sides unhesitatingly with the former, and were pogromed n due course when the latter triumphed. A
year later, during the Russian invasion, the Jews made common cause with the invader. In almost every town or village occupied by the Russian troops a soviet of local Jews was set up. The Italian Ambassador to Poland at the time, who has since published a volume of very shrewd and agreeably frank reminiscences,
after an acute analysis of the Jewish problem in Poland can only concluded tat � Gli ebrei sono attualmente un veleno nel sangue della Polonia tanto più pericoloso in quanto non se ne vede l�antidoto �.
2 Tommasini, La Risurrezione della Polonia, Milan, 1925.
The same authority expresses the opinion that, while the Jews and the Germans in Poland were bound from the first to be enemies of the Polish State, there was a real possibility at the outset for Polish co-operation with the Lithuanians, the White Russians and the Ukrainians. The White Russians—or, as the Poles prefer to call them, White ruthenes—are the poorest of the poor peasants in the Eastern Marches and, when questioned by the census authorities and others as to their nationality, reply � Catholic � or � Orthodox � or � of this place �. For the present at any rate they are not a self-conscious minority : so, unless the Poles start monkeying with their religion as the Russians were doing before the war, they should not give trouble.
As regards the Lithuanians, if ever there was a possibility of Polish-Lithuanian union, it was at the time when both Poland and Lithuania were in German tow. If the Peace of Brest had formed the basis of the new Eastern Europe, it is conceivable, though not probable, that the old union of the two States might have been brought about. When the Central Powers collapsed, the Germans were toying with a proposal to install a Swabian prince as Grand Duke of Lithuania. With a Hapsburg on the throne
of Poland, dynastic relations might have been established which, if union was not possible, would at least have facilitated amicable co-operation between the two States. But from the moment of the Central Powers� defeat, the Lithuanians� distrust of Polish designs on their independence was bound to gain the upper hand. The development of the two countries proceeded thereafter on diametrically opposite lines ; and since the seizure of Vilna by the Poles the two States have broken off all relations with one another.
Comment : �third party� or parties seem certain to have been present. (WPT).
The minorities of Central and Eastern Europe as they have emerged from the Settlement of 1919 are estimated at between 38,000,000 and 40,000,000 persons all told : and of all these there are—with one possible exception which the whole world condemns—none to whom Fate has been more cruel than the Ukrainians (Ruthenes) of East Galicia. Those who believe that the upheaval, which is duel (judging by the nineteenth-century precedent) round about 1948, will take the form of a general revolt of oppressed minorities may well direct their attention to the case of the Ukrainians : for there is no part of Europe where the upheaval is so likely to begin.
The agony of the Ukrainians was long drawn out. They are not of those who were the direct victims of the Peace Settlement. The Treaty of St. Germain left the future of East Galicia to the decision of the Western Powers ; and the Poles have profited in
successive stages by the indecision of the latter.1 The effect of the resolution of the conference of Ambassadors, which in the end (14 March 1923) recognized the fait accompli and abandoned East Galicia to the Poles without even a stipulation for local self-government2 such as was accorded to the Ukrainians placed under Czech sovereignty,3 was exactly as if it had been proposed to hand back the present Irish Free State to the English absentee landlords of the period before the first Gladstonian land legislation. In 1847, when Vienna posted notices of rewards for the heads of Polish rebels, the Ukrainian peasant brought in whole cartloads of heads to the
authorities, and the notices ad hastily to be withdrawn. Sixty-years later, in 1908, when a Ukrainian murdered the Polish Governor of Galicia, the Ukrainian intelligentsia organized pilgrimages to his house. The feeling to-day is very much worse than it was in1908 : for, though the Poles under Austria had a relatively free hand in Galicia, there were countless ways in which Vienna acted as a check, especially in the decade before the war.1 Now the Poles are sovereign, sovereign in fact and—if the Conference of Ambassadors is regarded as a fount of international law—soverign also in law ; and the Ukrainian peasant is handed over without let or hindrance to the mercies of his Polish landlord.
Comment : the alternative then was the mercies of the Soviet commissar. — (WPT).
1 Tommasini, op. cit., : � Le Principali Potenze inagurarono cosi, nella questione della Galizia orientale, una politica passiva, divui la Polonia ha gradualment profittato, giungendo ad una soluzione che ha oltrepassato le sue più audaci speranze.�
2 The decision of the Conference of Ambassadors was not taken until the Poles had passed a law (26 September 1922) for the establishment of provincial self-government for the three Ukrainian departments (Lemberg, Stanislau and Tarnopol) and the creation of a Ukrainian University at Lemberg within two years. But, at the instance of France, the conference of Ambassadors made no reference to this law in its decision of 14 March 1923, and the Poles now claim that it is no longer binding. No steps have been taken at any time to give effect to it.
3 It is true, it has been of little use to the Ukrainians, the Czechs having failed to comply with their obligation (under the Minorities Treaty . . . ) to establish a local Diet.
[ page 181 ] 1 Under the Peace of Brest Austria undertook to detach East Galicia, and combine it with the Bukowina (of which a large part of the population are Ukrainian) in a separate Crownland.
The last phase in this unhappy story is the dispatch of a regiment of Polish cavalry to � pacify � the Ukrainian villages—i.e. to flog the peasants and wreck their co-operative stores—in reprisal for the burning of landlords� stacks. The Polish Government�s � Observations � in reply to the Ukrainian petitions to the Poe and to the League of nations read exactly like the apologies of the Sublime Porte for the exploits of the � Hamidian cavalry � the morning after an Armenian massacre. � A very large share of the responsibility must rest with the Ukrainian revolutionary organizations. . . . [etc].�
All these sentences the Western World has read before in the news from Constantinople in the �nineties of the last century : but in those days it read them with horror.
Comment : while I do not know the details of these stories, I note that Mr. Despencer seems to have been blissfully unaware of the Soviet threat. He does not ever mention the meddling by the trained saboteurs, who were then present in any place the Soviets could infiltrate. Ukraine would be among the most natural targets. — (WPT)
Similar methods have been tried—less successfully—with the Germans. To secure a majority for the Sanacja (the � Clear-the-mess-up� party of Piłsudski and his colonels) at the 1929 elections, the Germans, amongst others, were to be prevented from voting. They were prevented. [?]
But the Germans are bad subjects for persecution. While they are being bastinadoed on the soles of their feet, they memorize with true German thoroughness the names and appearance of their persecutors, and report them the following orning—or as soon as they can walk—to their Verein. The result is that all German petitions after atrocities are � damnably documentés � � which to their hot-blooded aggressors, who were only out for a little politics and ready after the Election to let bygones be bygones, does not seem to be playing the game. � The trouble with the Germans �, they are eager to explain, � is that they have no sense of humour.�
( . . )
What are the minorities to say . . . or do ? If this is how they are treated under Piłsudski, what can they expect from the Right, with whom anti-Semitism and repression of the minorities are avowed planks of the party platform ? The minorities are bound under these circumstances to be enemies of the State. What Frenchman, what Englishman, what American in their position would be anything else ? The marvel is that the Poles themselves cannot see it. The English in the past have been blind to that which concerned their own peace, in America in the eighteenth and in Ireland in the nineteenth century, but not elsewhere ; and the English anyway are a stupid and a stubborn people. The Poles are neither stupid nor stubborn people. They are the most intelligent and at the same time the most elastic people in Eastern Europe, and perhaps for that reason the most attractive. It was once said of Russia that, like the god Janus, she has two faces, an Oriental and an Occidental face, and that she turns the Oriental face to the West and
the Occidental face to the East. The new Poland, on the contrary, affects to be a Westerner to the Western world and an Oriental to he subject races. It is an attitude which Poland frankly cannot afford. Only very rich and strong countries can afford to rule subject races on the oderint dum metuant principle, and even they not for long ; and Poland, with clamant internal problems still unsolved and an international position which is the outcome of a foreign policy based on bad relations with each of her two most powerful neighbours and exclusive reliance on the support of France, is not such a country. Under present conditions in Europe, a new and unconsolidated State which cannot command the willing allegiance of its subjects is living on a volcano ; and those who lend it money, whether for armaments or other purposes, will deserve no more sympathy, when the crash comes, than those who after the warning of the first Russian Revolution in 1905 continued to put their savings in the pocket of the Tsar.
( pages 171 ff. )