13 
LAND & WATER 
August 24, 1916 
The Establishment of Poland.— II 
This scries 0/ articles is from a Special Correspondent on 
the Polish question, which has in the last few weeks become 
exlremelv critical.' The immediate future of the war on 
its strategical as on its political side may xftll turn upon 
the German project of conscripting Polish troops, and Ihe 
resitlti of the uar zHU be defined by the sdllcmenl oj Poland. 
^HE Polisb nation arose like every other national 
group in Europe, in the Dark Ages — that is, in 
T! 
the period between the gradual and imper- 
ceptible dissolution of the Roman Empire- 
say the 6th and 7th centuries — and the sudden tlowcring 
of the Middle Ages, which followed the Crusades and 
which marks the 12th century. 
In those 500 years a chaos of lordships gradually 
coalesced into groups, which became more and more 
united and national, and we have at the end of the process 
clearly defined kingdoms witli less clearly delined nation- 
alities attached to their owners : France,. Hungary, 
England, etc. 
These great groups did not come together by accident, 
or through the genius of individual men, but from 
political aftinity, partly of language, partly of custom, 
partly of race. The Polish unit was formed in the follow- 
ing manner ; 
Outside the Roman Empire to the East of Europe m 
the great afforested plains which are watered by mighty 
and sluggish rivers there was half settled, half still 
nomadic, a mass of population the common characters of 
whose speech we now call the Slav. It was not only a 
speech but something common in the race which gave 
unity to these millions. They did not affect the sea ; 
they did not use it. Yet the s^a bounded them. They 
stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic, although along 
their .southern shores Greeks and, later, Mongols barred 
them off ; on their northern side the Scandinavians and 
fragments of the Turanian races, the Finns. 
This vast Slav mass was singularly fluid. It lacked 
any apparent neucleus of political unity. Such a unity 
might have gradually grown up, and the various Slavonic 
languages, so clearly proceeding from a. common root, the 
tongues spoken by the Lithuanians, by what were later 
the Pohsh districts, by the various tribes inhabiting what 
to-day we call Russia, e^en the southern offshoots of the 
race, in the Balkans and in Bohemia, might conceivably 
have grown to make one State and we might to-day have 
had a great Slavonic Empire stretching half across 
Europe to the Adriatic, to the Upper Elbe arid Lower 
Oder. The causes that have prevented such a thing 
developing in history have been two, the first the great 
Mongol invasion of the Dark Ages, which formed Hun- 
gary and cut off the northern from the southern Slavs. 
The second, and much more important, the diverse 
religious history of varying portions of its territory. 
The capital factor in European development for 
centuries after the Fall of the Roman Empire was the 
conversion of men hitherto pagan to Christianity. With 
that alone are contemporaries concerned. 
You will never find the chroniclers troubling themselves 
about whether a great leader or the men of his armies were 
"Celts" or "Slavs." The whole concern of all men 
was the boundary between an outer and menacing 
barbaric paganism and an inner cultivated Christendom 
which were perpetually at war, Christendom perpetually 
expanding, training and teaching the outer barbaric 
heathendom, ever bringing with it letters, building roads, 
making laws and civilisation in general. 
Thus the Irish missionaries and the Prankish and 
Gallic soldiers after centuries of effort bring in those of 
the Germans who are still pagan. The Magyars of Hun- 
gary are brought in as late as the loth century, the 
Scandinavians a little earlier. 
The Slavs had in this connection a curious fate. The 
Eastern Slavs received their missionaries from the Greek 
speaking empire. Their alphabet is derived from the 
Greek as is their religious ritual and the very organisa- 
tion of their church. - 
The Western Slavs received their religion not up from 
the shores of the Black Sea and the valleys of the Dnieper 
and the Dniester, but eastward from the west and from 
tlic south, from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. 
The Latin language, the Roman law, the Western ritual, 
doctrine and religious organisation were those under 
which they entered Christendom. 
The Southern Slavs were divided. One half of them — 
roughly the half now within the Austro-Hungarian Em- 
pire — received the Western influence ; the other half — 
roughly modern Serbia and Bulgaria — the Eastern. 
The Slavs of the Bohemian plain, the further western 
extension of the race, were entirely under the influence 
of the Roman or Gallic, Western conception of Christian, 
ritual, discipline and doctrine. Not only were their 
bishops in communion with Rome, but their whole cul- 
ture was part and parcel of Western things. 
To the north and east of the Bohemians another group 
of Slavs, in the loth century, about 100 years before the 
Norman conquest of England, received this Western 
culture. 
The first nucleus of the new State that was about to be 
formed and to be later called Poland, was found in the 
district Posania ; in the valley of that tributary of the 
Oder which is called the Warta, and in the country side 
the chief town of which to-day is the Polish town of 
Posna. of which the German have made " Posen." 
From that historical centre Polish unity grew up in a 
few generations. But this original centre lay far out 
towards the eastern boundary of the whole group, and 
the backbone, as it were, of the new Polish State was the 
river Vistula. 
In the third article of this series, which will appear 
ne.xt week, a map will better explain the general position 
as well as the corresponding difficulties which the geo- 
graphy of Poland has lent to its history. 
Roughl}' speaking, this new Slav State, with its Latin 
religion and its wholly Western culture, lay in the basin of 
the Vistula from the Carpathians to the Baltic. To th(.> 
west it included the valley of the Warta up to, and in 
places crossing, the Upper Oder, and occupying what 
to-day we call Silesia. Eastward, the new State 
or group had a curiously undefined boundary, the nature 
of which it is very important to grasp, because its lack 
of precision has affected the whole of Polish history. 
In the basin of the Niemen and the marshy and lake 
district to the east of it, along the shores of the Baltic 
and up to the (nilf of Riga, there lay a pagan Slav group, 
the Lithuanians. They stretched down to that great 
mass of marsh which to-day we called the Marshes of 
Pinsk, and which have been so prominent by their 
strategical effect upon this great war. The whole of 
these eastern flats were, therefore, a belt of paganism 
cutting off the Western Christianity of Poland from the 
Eastern Christianity of the young Russian Principate^s, 
which were gradually rising far in the interior. This 
pagan belt lasted all through the Middle Ages and only 
accepted the Christian religion and culture within a 
century or so of the Reformation. 
Poland, therefore, during all the great years of her 
history, during her development as a great mediaeval 
State, and as one of the chief Powers of Europe in the 
l6th century, was not only by religion and tradition 
Western, but could not in the nature of things look ea.st- 
ward at all, nor think of herself as a sister State to the 
Slavs of the interior beyond the pagan belt. Her sharp, 
clearly defined boiiudary, was, as it is to-day, the western 
and the southern boundary : the boundary which 
separates her from the Magyars on the south and from 
the wholly alien ^(ierman-speaking peoples upon the 
west. Her boundary to the east was, has always been, 
and is to-day, a vague fluctuating thing, and we shall see 
' later in this series the very high modern importance of 
this contrast between the western and the eastern limits 
of the Polish people. 
But when we have grasped what geographically the 
unity of Poland is, and where this highly distinct nation 
stands, how it is necessarily Western and even intensely 
Western in culture and development, we must ne.xt intro- 
duce a point which has had a permanent effect upon the 
history of the country. That point is the connection, 
the contrast, and the conflict between the German- 
speaking tribes and the Polish nation. 
