From THE POLISH NATION, 1907 by Wincenty Lutosławski

Of America all the oppressed of other countries dream as of a safe refuge of liberty, and when they can no longer endure the iniquities of their governments, they seek America, trusting to find there perfect freedom, not only for their thoughts but also for their words and actions. But at a time when America was unknown, it was Poland, as the only great republican commonwealth in Europe, which received all refugees, alike from the Eastern States of Tartary and Muscovy, also from the German principalities, governed by tyrannic and ambitious princes, and even from Italy, France, (etc). The . . Unitarians published many books in Poland, at Rakow, which became famous among them, when their liberty of free expression of thought was curtailed by the trinitarians of all other countries. The Jews, before they discovered America as their promised land, concentrated mainly in Poland, which became their chief home for many centuries, while they were persecuted everywhere else. The Armenians . .  came in large numbers to Poland where they have preserved even now a separate ecclesiastical hierarchy with an archbishop in Lwów. The Hussites, when they were threatened with extermination in Bohemia, found liberty in Poland.   (pp. 21-22)

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. . . falsehoods about Poland have been widely circulated everywhere, and often without the slightest contradiction, so that they bear the semblance of truth. There is certainly no other country, nor any other nation, so much slandered ; and there are very clear motives, which explain this inevitable falsification of history, which has gone on for the last tow hundred years.

Never before in the history of mankind had a powerful and large state been suddenly partitioned among three neighbors. Frequently one nation has been conquered by another, but never before had the conqueror differed so radically from the conquered as the dynastic, bureaucratic Prussian, Austrian, or Muscovite differed from the democratic and republican Pole.

Thus for three great centralised, dynastic, bureaucratic governments, it became an imperious necessity to conceal the truth about their victim in order to justify their aggression, and to misrepresent their lawlessness as the rule of law and justice, and Polish liberty as anarchy and disorder. They used every available means for that purpose. They found even good scholars, famous for their learning and trustworthiness in their studies on other subjects, who either for honours or for money, or to avoid persecution, or because they were blinded by the apparent greatness of their employers, used all the apparatus of scholarship and historical research to misrepresent the past and present of Poland.

From the works of German professors these falsehoods have penetrated into seemingly impartial French and English essays or encyclopaedias, so that I could count on a single page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica not less than forty mistakes of fact in the article on the great Pole Mickiewicz. This is quite natural, the article being written by . . . an admirer of Muscovite greatness. Even writers apparently independent . . . were won over to the cause of the oppressors against the victim. The chief French chair of Slavic literature in Paris, founded for Mickiewicz, is now [1907] held by [one] who is also prejudiced against Poland.   (pp. 23-24)

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The Prussians and Russians, having been at all points opposed to the Poles and in many respects similar to one another, had a natural tendency to join their frontiers over a subjugated Poland, and after perpetrating the crime of partitioning Poland, attempted by every means to deceive all the Aryan [Indo-European] nations as to the real motives and consequences of their action. They are now constantly inventing fresh calumnies ; and they find many Poles who believe them, for they teach a falsified history in their schools, attendance in which has become obligatory for Polish children ; [that was exactly the case also in the Soviet-dominated Poland 1945-1980. (WPT)] they maintain a large venal press, actively engaged in clever distortions of historical truth ; they publish false official statistics ; they hire the services of sophists in the guise of university professors at home or abroad, or in the guise of diplomatic agents of their own or other countries; or by flattery they win over some vain and gifted publicist (etc). They mingle truth with falsehood as skillfully as cotton is mixed with wool in shoddy materials to give every appearance of wool to the mixture. This has been done generation after generation, and unanimously, by the three centralised and bureaucratic governments of Prussia, Russia and Austria. False hoods obstinately repeated during centuries and not denied by the victims, even partly believed by some of them, because of the great difficulty of getting at the truth—such falsehoods become invested with all the authority of well-established historical truths.

The victims have little leisure for historical research. They re forbidden the use of books, from which they might learn the truth ; they are reduced by spoliation to poverty or economic slavery ; they employ most of their strength in actual struggles, and have no leisure to discuss history. Libraries are burnt, or carried away to St. Petersburgh ; documents are stolen or falsified ; churches are transformed into Protestant temples or Greek orthodox tserkoffs ; ancient names of places are changed and forbidden even in local use ; thousands of children are torn from their parents to be perversely educated as the most efficient persecutors of their own race and nation ; even the use of the language is forbidden in public gatherings and becomes restricted to the unsafe privacy of a constantly disturbed family life.

Never before or since have such varied means been used to conceal and transform the historical truth about a nation-because so sudden and almost unexpected a partition of one of the largest states of Europe has never happened. Poland was larger and more populous than any single one of the partitioning powers, but she could not resist three simultaneous attacks in time of peace, when no war had been prepared or expected. From three sides, the small numbers of those who still dared to resist were surrounded by an enemy closing in upon them. The King of Prussia used for this purpose over a million pounds given to him by England as a subsidy to be employed against the French revolution. Thus he performed a double betrayal (etc).   (pp 26-27)

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Poland is in the centre of Europe ; if you find on a map the old city of Kraków (Cracow), which has been, and still remains the chief centre of Poland's intellectual and artistic life, you will find that it is about equidistant from Perm in the north-east and Seville in the south-west, from Bergen in the north and Syracuse or Athens in the south, from Queenstown in the north-west and Astrachan in the south-east or Archangel in the north-east, — to take only the chief points which determine the political outline of Europe. This central position of Poland has been obscured in the minds of the historians by the circumstance that they have heretofore devoted much more attention to the Germanic and Romanic nations than to the Slavs and Turanians, whose historical career among the nations of Europe began later. As long as we take into consideration only Germany, France, England, Spain, and Italy, of course Paris or Geneva, and not Cracow, will be the natural centre of Europe ; and even to such a Europe the Poles would still belong by their character, tradition and religion. But since certain Turanians, like the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, and the Finns, have penetrated among the Aryan nations, and the Turanian Muscovites have accepted a Slavic language and conquered many Slavic and Lithuanian peoples, our conception of Europe must be extended to its geographical limits, the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains. And in such a Europe Poland will be the centre, not only geographically, but also ethnographically.

If we go north of Poland, we meet with four different nationalities : Lithuanians, Finns, Swedes, Lapps. Likewise, south of Poland, we find four chief nationalities : Hungarians, Roumanians, Bulgarians, and Greeks, without counting the Turks, who do not belong to Europe. East of Poland we have the Ruthenians, Muscovites, Tartars, Czeremis ; while west of Poland we have either the Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese in southwestern direction, or the Germans, Dutch, English and Irish in a northwestern direction. Whenever we go from Poland towards the border of Europe, we meet from three to five chief nationalities. Poland in its narrowest sense is the country between the western Carpathian Mountains and the Baltic Sea, chiefly the basin of the rivers Oder, Vistula, Niemen and Warta, with Kraków, (Cracow), Warszawa (Warsaw), Poznan (pose), Gdansk (Danzig) as its chief towns. This country has been inhabited by one and the same nation from immemorial times, and there is no historical tradition of the Poles coming from elsewhere, or having been conquered or assimilated by a foreign nation.

While every other part of Europe has been invaded and conquered by foreigners, the Poles have kept the country of their origin, materially less favoured by natural resources than many other countries, but very suitable for agriculture. Fir it is neither so flat as the eastern plain of Russia, nor so mountainous as western Europe, and is irrigated by many small rivers, that slowly descend towards the Baltic Sea, and are very rarely threatened with inundations from which they are protected by large forests.

This central and intermediate position of Poland had great drawbacks, besides obvious advantages. For centuries the Poles had to deal with no fewer then nineteen different neighbours. Only four of these neighbours were Slavs : the Czechs or Bohemians in the west, the Slowaks in the south, Ruthenians in the south-east and the White Russians in the north-east. Thus the Poles were not only in the centre of Europe, but also in the centre of the Slavic population within which the Polish State had grown. Three of the neighbours were of the Letto-Lithuanian branch of Aryans, and occupied the country north of the Poles : the Prussians, Lithuanians, and Letts. There are more closely related to the Slavs than other Aryans, but do not belong to the Slavic branch ; and in prehistoric times they separated themselves from the common Slavo-Lettic stock before the differentiation of the Slavs had begun. Besides these seven, they had four other Aryan neighbours : the Germans, the Danes, the Swedes and the Roumanians. A twelfth Aryan nation, whose home is distant from Poland, immigrated in great numbers into our country : the Armenians. They may therefore be considered also as neighbours of Poland .Besides these twelve Aryan nations, the Poles had constantly to deal with, and often to fight, with five Turanian nations : the Esths, the Muscovites, the Tartars, the Turks and the Hungarians. And also as neighbours without a home, we must consider the Gypsies and the Jews, who came to Poland in great numbers, seeking a safe refuge from the persecution they suffered in other countries. Besides all these, Scotch, Italians, and Greeks were also found in great numbers in Poland in the pursuit of their various trades, so that no less than twenty two different kinds of people were familiar to the Poles.

These relations of the Poles with twenty two different nations further increased the difficulty of learning the truth about Poland. As usual in primitive conditions, most of the neighbourly relations were not friendly and many misunderstandings, calumnies, and quarrels arose. These produced a vast fund of error about Poland, which has permeated the general information available for the more distant civilized French and English nations.

No small or great nation of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire has had to deal and to struggle with so many different peoples of different race and origin ; and in that respect alone the United States of America have beaten every previous record, as they count among their citizens not only most of the twenty two nations known in Poland, but also great numbers of other races : aborigines of America, Africa, Eastern Asia and Western Europe. As a centre of conflicting ethnographic tendencies, Poland was the greatest experiment in humanity before the United States started on its singular career ; and all the difficulties of judging the contemporary American exist in a similar way when we undertake to judge the Poles. Apart form the wilful misrepresentation of history by three powerful states, there are to be take into account the involuntary mistakes of twenty two nationalities surrounding or penetrating into Poland.   (p. 27-30)

A LECTURE DELIVERED
at the Lowell Institute in Boston on October 21, 1907,
and at the University of California on March 9, 1908.
Paris : Boyveau et Chevillet 1917.

From What Me Befell, 1933 by J. J. Jusserand

The representative of Russia in Copenhagen was count Benckendorff ; none of my colleagues was as free-spoken as this servant of the Tsar. Perfectly loyal to his sovereign and his country, he nevertheless did not conceal in his conversations with me his misgivings as to the future of both. His wife, née Schouvaloff, was just the same ; the greatest crime in history, she once told me, was the partition of Poland ; other countries have been subjugated, but this one was divided into three parts and each part was forced to be the enemy of the other two.

Boston and New York : Houghton Mifflin 1933, page 201.

Author Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 1821-1891. Title Die Idee des Polentum's [microform]. Publisher Königsberg, [1848] Description 1 v. Series Bibliothek der deutschen Literatur ;fiche 16607. Original Original held by: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. gw ISBN 359850974X : Language German [??]