August 31, igi6 
LAND & WATER 
15 
The Establishment of Poland.— Ill 
BY the time that the Christian rehgion, and with 
it civihsation, came to the Poles from the south 
and west, it was already completely established 
in all the German tribes. This chaotic mass of 
barbarism stretching from the North Sea and the Baltic 
in a sort of corridor or street down to the Alps, and pene- 
trating all the valleys of that mountain system up to 
and beyond the watershed of the Mediterranean, was not 
one in race and origin. 
The scientific, observer to-day notes many different 
tribes, and especially a broad distinction between the 
Southern mountain German and the Northerner from the 
marshes, heaths, and forests of the Plain. The sole 
common characteristic whereby this mass of warring and 
hitherto half nomadic tribes was given some sort of 
unity was the bond of language. Even here the con- 
ception of one standard form such as has always arisen 
in nations of classical culture was lacking. These German 
tribes which were perpetually coalescing and separating 
again into various fluid forms, spoke innumerable dialects. 
Among them all, however, there was a similarity which 
distinguished the local dialects sharply from the Latin 
speech to the west of them and the Slav to the east. 
The western fringe of these barbarians had been, for 
many centuries before the conversion of the whole, subject 
to the influences of civilisation. The left bank of the 
Rhine where a belt of population from twentj' to a 
hundred miles broad was German, had been under the 
control of the Roman Empire ever since the conquest of 
Gaul. And from this belt the conversion of the Eastern 
Germanics behind had proceeded maihly as the effect of 
military conquest conducted by the armies whose leaders 
had their palaces in the Roman towns of Metz, of Aix la 
Chapelle, Laon, Rheims and Paris. 
"The Empire" 
The fact that the Germanics were now Christian and 
were the innnediate neighbours of a new Slav community 
also Christians, and Christians of the same type, made 
some intermixture between the two inevitable upon their 
frontiers. But there was another influence at work, 
which not only added to such intermixture, but also had 
the effect of slightly pushing back eastward the boundary' 
of Slav speech and of extending the boundary of German. 
This was' the institution called, in the Middle Ages, 
" The Empire." 
An artificial bond had arisen between Italy and certain 
of the German Kings almost at the moment when Poland 
was baptised. A theory was erected convenient at 
first both to the church and to the now Christian tribal 
Kings in German^', and consonant with the remaining 
traditions and memories of Charlemagne, that a German 
tribal King admitted by the Pope in Rome as " Em- 
peror " was a sort of constitutional descendant of the 
real Empire, that is, the ^-eal European unity which 
Charlemagne had reconstituted, and which had fallen 
to pieces again within a century of his death. The thing 
was not a theory, it was a fiction and a conscious fiction. 
The rapidly consolidating French nation would have 
nothing to do with it. Britain was outside its orbit. 
This so-called " Empire " was in practice nothing 
but the claim of some one of the German dynasties 
to interfere periodically in Itahan affairs, and to lead 
armies through the mountains to the south. It had, 
however, a powerful effect upon the German tribes 
themselves, who could not but regard the local dynasty 
thus crowned at Rome as being a sort of general overlord 
over themselve.'^ , and it correspondingly affected the 
Christian Slavs to the east, those of Bohemia and those 
of Poland. Unlike the older Western Christianity a 
certain hierarchy between them and this fictitious " Em- 
peror-" of the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages was not 
absurd or unthinkable. They had entered Christendom 
together ; they were close neighbours, and the Slavs were 
cut off from south and w-est by territories which the 
so-called " Imperial Power " did in some sense rule. 
It was largely under the pressure of this institution 
with its strong spiritual backing of Papal acknowledgment 
and its Latin titles that the boundaries of the German 
speech were somewhat extended towards the east through- 
out the later Dark A.ges and the whole of the Middle 
Ages ; not only were they extended towards the east, 
but a certain further spread of German language among 
those who were Slav bj' race took place. 
Expansion toward the Sea 
There was another quite different force at work tending 
to the same general end. This new Christian State of 
Poland was not maritime. It was destined to reach the 
sea and to have a port upon the Baltic, but it did not 
look to the sea, nor live by the sea at all, and right away 
from the mouth of the Vistula to beyond the Gulf of 
Riga (where a Finnish race began) Pagan Slavs for whom 
the best general term is Lithuanian, but to whfjm modern 
religious changes have given separate titles to-day, 
stretched along the shores of the sea and thence down 
southward in that Pagan belt or corridor of which we have 
spoken in previous articles, which cut off Poland with 
its Latin religions from the Russian principalities with 
their Greek rite and doctrine. 
The conquest, the civilisation and the baptising of these 
tribes was not undertaken by the Poles. It was under- 
taken by Orders of Chivalry wholly German in composition 
and coming by sea and along the seacoast. These estab- 
lished themselves gradually as overlords from the mouth 
of the Vistula for one hundred miles to the east of that 
point and southward some fifty miles or so to the district 
of marshes and lakes which is called the Masurian. Later 
the efforts of these Teutonic knights proceeded still 
further northward and their descendants and the mer- 
chants following them acquired vast estates and founded 
commercial towns right up to the further shores of the 
Gulf of Riga. But this further extension to the north 
does not greatly concern our present subject. What we 
have to note is the foundation by these. Teutonic knights 
during the Middle Ages of a sort of island State in the 
centre of which was the town where their kings were 
crowned, Konigsberg. 
We call it an "island," because it was everywhere 
isolated by alien speech from the rest of the Germanics. 
There was and is a belt of Polish-speaking people to the 
west of it beyond the Vistula mouth along the seaboard, 
and the whole mass of Slavonic speech to the south and 
to the east of it as well, while, on the north, it stretched 
to the sea. This singular and to Europe disastrous 
experiment in the fusion of the races took on and con- 
tinued the old local name of the principal Pagan tribe- 
land the Teutonic knights had conquered, and was known 
as Borussia, of which the modern form grew' to be 
" Prussia." The Prussians were that strange race Slav 
in basis, but chemically changed by the dominating 
minority of Teutonic blood intermixed with the Slav. 
This peculiar product it was which, developing a spirit 
quite different from that of the other German-speaking 
tribes, organised for war and by a succession of later 
accidents united with its Crown many purely German 
States, lay at the root of all that modern military tradition 
which we call Prussia. 
Here, then, is the situation. Poland, more and more 
of a conscious and imited Christian people as the Middle 
Ages proceeded, was geographically anomalous ; not 
only because upon her eastern borders there had appeared 
an inevitable admixture of German speech with Polish 
speech, but much more because a whole slice of what 
would have been normally Christian Slavdom had, 
through the crusade of the Teutonic knights and the 
geographical accident of the marshy lake belt to their 
south, been cut off and carved out of what might have 
been the united body of Poland. This historical exception 
more than anything else threatened the future of the 
PoUsh people, and w'as destined much later to destroy, 
for now more than a century, their independence. If 
we take the border of Polish speech as it now stands, 
we find upon the edges of that border a varyin g propor- 
tion of German admixture, and cut right out from the 
midst of it upon the north the German-speaking exception 
