INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

THE POLISH QUESTION AND THE FUTURE

WORLD PEACE.

"An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant."

-President Wilson to the Senate, January 8, 1918.

With Russia apparently disintegrating politically, with Prussianized Germany pressing her policy in the East and with America in the war to suppress Prussian autocracy and to bring liberty to the smaller nations, Poland's reconstruction took the first rank in the war issue. Since the time hostilities were struck, the Polish Question discarded its swaddling clothes of an "internal question," and changed its less pretentious name of a European problem to that of a world problem of such vital importance, that in self-respect and for its own salvation, the world

of Democracy must restore Poland her birthright to freedom and independence.

The fundamental root of the Polish question lies deep in the Polish history. Five centuries ago, Poland had already been an ancient kingdom. From the reign of Casimir the Great, 1333, to the time of Sobieski, 1674-96, Poland was the greatest state in Europe. In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Poles were one of the most cultured nations on the continent.

The territory of Poland reached, at its fullest expansion, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, North and South, and from the Oder to the Bug, West and East. This territorial expansion was rendered possible by Lithuania uniting to Poland in 1386, and by Ruthenia seeking and actually succeeding in uniting herself to Poland not long after.

The Union of Lithuania with Poland stands forth as the greatest historical fact in Central Europe. It brought immense advantage to the national development of the Poles and the Lithuanians, and it rendered a huge service to civilization, because, so united, the two people were

enabled all the more to check the advance of Germanism East, and the outpour of the Asiatic hordes West. In fact, the reason why Lithuania joined Poland was to make herself and Poland safe against German propaganda that was carried through the agency of the Knights of the Cross. Here is an object lesson both to the Poles and the Lithuanians, and to the statesmen who will remake Europe. For the danger which confronted the two people in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is confronting them again at this time, and unless a free and united Poland and Lithuania work out their national destinies in concert and union, neither they nor the world will be safe against the Prussian aim of world dominion.

What the world suffers from the weird Prussianism today, Poland suffered five hundred years ago. And what the world learned of the selfish aim of Prussia today, in Poland every child knew for centuries past.

Germany originally extended up to the Oder. East of this river lived a Slavic people. Pomerania was a Slavic province belonging to Poland,

and Silesia was anything but a German territory. By inroads, murderous raids, by treason and intrigues, by fomenting divisions and setting up small kingdoms among these peoples, exactly as they are doing at preesnt, the Germans suppressed and swallowed them up one after the other. The German expansion in the East reached its greatest area towards the close of the fourteenth century. Through the agency of the Knights of the Cross, Prussianism engulfed Courland, Livonia and Esthonia, and would have devoured, no doubt, Lithuania and Poland, had these two nations not united and signally defeated the German Princes in the famous battle of Grunwald, 1410. But for Grunwald, Prussia would have long ago annexed the countries and destroyed the peoples she has recently taken possession of, and realized her dream of a PanGermany. And she would have, beyond all doubt, reached a point where Democracy were powerless to overcome it.

But the Prussian danger was not the only problem Poland had by her very geographic posi

tion and ethnic tendency to deal with. From the East and the South, the Muscovites, the Tartars and the Turks kept constantly pressing West. Warna in 1444, and Vienna in 1638, were only two of a hundred places where Poland saved Western civilization from its inevitable destruction by these unbridled hordes. Poland spent half of her life as sentinel, sword in hand, gun leveled and eye strained, watching for the troublesome enemy to spring to her doom and to the doom of Europe. Precisely for this reason the manifold internal progress that characterized Poland from her inception is all the more worthy of notice. Already in 1347 Casimir the Great, who is not improperly called the Polish Charlemagne, instituted the Statutes of Wislica. They were the Magna Charta of Poland, and were promulgated shortly after Frederick II of Germany published his laws, and St. Louis of France declared his Institutes of Law. As far back as 1430, Poland issued her memorable law: Neminem captivabimus nisi jure victum, which antedated the famous English law: Habeas Corpus, by nearly two centuries and a half.