i6 
LAND & WATER 
August 31, 1916 
of Prussia with its centre at Konigsberg. 
There was a third factor of confusion which ultimately 
proved of the greatest weight. 
Jews in Poland 
The kingdom of Poland was. during the Middle Ages, 
the refuge of the Jewish people. They here enjoyed a 
universal toleration which elsewhere in Europe was 
exceptional. They were here not subject to those occa- 
sional but violent persecutions which everywhere else 
have lelt upon their national traditions so deep a tradition 
of wrong. The Jews Hocked to Poland, establishing 
themselves not. as in the rest of Europe, in little town 
communities hving their own life, but in regular colonies, 
and before the process was completed with the end of 
the Middle Ages, something like half of all the Jewish 
race was to be found established within the kingdom. 
Had these very numerous Colonies, this vast inunigra- 
tion grown to be Slavonic in speech, the result would have 
been very different from that which we see to day. As a 
fact, coming mainly eastward from the Germanics these 
immigrant Jewish Colonies for the most part retained a 
German dialect as their speech and many customs of 
German civilisation in their culture. 
This was the third anomaly destined to warp the 
imity of the Polish State, although it was not until many 
centuries had passed that its effect became apparent. 
To day it is true to say that one of the chief problems 
presented to the statesman in the re-erection of Poland 
will be the settlement of tlie friction between the very 
large, separate, and foreign speaking Jewish element 
and the Polish element in the midst of which it lives. 
The reader is now possessed of the main facts which 
bctw:ecn them have rendered so difficult the task of 
defining with true geographical boundaries and of restor- 
ing in stable fashion the Polish Slate. It remains to be 
added that this State, in the centuries when it flourished 
most, was of a social constitution peculiar in Europe 
and by a sort of necessity leading to grave weakness in 
the crisis of the national fate. The Polish State had 
grown to be in the Middle Ages an aristocratic Republic. 
The nobles were not, as elsewhere, a very small propor- 
tion of the whole population, distinct as elsewhere from 
the commercial middle classes of the towns and reposing 
upon a vast majority of agricultural labour, which in the 
West and South of Europe passed ' through all stages 
from mere serfdom to the complete freedom of a. Christian 
peasantry. In Poland the nobler class was very numer- 
ous, a tenth or an eighth of the Polish speaking people. 
That class w-as in actual possession of the land ; a 
possession not modified by the complex feudal relations 
which had arisen elsewhere, and the majority which 
tilled the land beneath it were serfs only. Of a true 
middle class there w-as hardly any. Its place was supplied 
by the Jews who fulfilled those functions of commerce, 
finance and the flux of travel which the bourgeoisie and 
the clergy provide in the older states in Germany, France, 
Italy, England and Spain. In a word, Poland, thus lying 
far upon the Eastern boundary of Latin Europe, and in 
some sense cut off, had remained simpler and more primi- 
tive in its organisation than the older States to the west 
of it, and at the same time had suffered quite peculiar 
anomalies in its development. The monarch was but a 
crowned noble, proceeding and holding power from the 
body of nobles. When the Reformation, or rather the 
later consequences of that movement had introduced 
here, as elsewhere, chances of national divisions and civil 
wars, the loosely organised State could barely stand the 
strain. We know how^ the duelism between the new 
reform and the older religion was settled elsewhere. 
We have in England the triumph of the one principle, in 
Spain of the other ; in France the segregation of a large 
and important minority which remained ex-centric to 
the mass of the State, and when the religious wars were 
ended, not disturbing the unity of that State. In the 
Gcrmanies by the middle of the seventeenth century men 
settled down upon the famous formula : " Let each region 
have its own religion," and the Catholic and Protestant 
States lived side by side at last in peace. In Poland the 
quarrel was not so much between the Reformers proper 
and the Conservatives in Church matters as between those 
who leant to a national establishment which would 
still preserve rights and doctrines intact but would re-act 
against Papal supremacy, and an opposing body largely 
supported by the Jesuits who stood for the full effect of 
the counter-Reformation. The latter superficially 
triumphed, but not completely nor fundamentally, and 
this spiritual schism in the State was accompanied by a 
general disintegration, by the arising of various factions, 
which soon were hopelessly confused and early lost their 
simple religious distinction, becoming purely political 
in aim, and varying with chaotic rapidity. In the i8th 
century this state of affairs had produced no social anarchy 
indeed but a sort of political 'anarchy,' or at any rate 
an impasse. And, in general, by the middle of the 
eighteenth century excuse was afforded to the two 
powerful neighbours, Prussia now grown to a great State 
upon the North and West, Russia, now grown to a vast 
organised despotism upon the East, to interfere with 
what they might plausibly represent to be a neighbouring 
centre of disturbance dangerous to' their own borders. 
- Between such an attitude, however, and a positive policy 
of interference, there was a gulf. The doctrine of nation- 
ality was fundamental in the morals of Christendom 
and was symbolised by the rights of the national and 
regional Crowns. To subject a people and to suppress 
its national unity and destroy its throne was everywhere 
thought a crime. That crime was none the less com- 
mitted, and the prime mover in it was Frederick of 
Prussia. He it was who supported and inflamed the 
existing ambition of the Russian monarchy in the matter 
until, supported by that Monarchy, he compelled the 
reluctant acquiescence of the third party, the Empress at 
Vienna, the ruler at once of Hungary, of German-speak- 
ing .-Austria and of Bohemia. Persuaded that if Russia'' and 
Prussia between them divided Poland, Austria could not 
stand without a balancing share, Maria Theresa reluct- 
antly put her hand to the infamous compact, but said as 
she did so that the enormity would have consequences for 
which her children's children would bleed. . 
She was right. It is from the partition of Poland that 
tlje Great War of to-day ultimately proceeds. It was the 
conuuon necessity of keeping Poland in subjection Which 
bound in unnatural interdependence the Prussian with 
the Russian autocracy, the German speaking Monarchy 
with the -Slav. It was the necessity of governing a 
great portion of Poland, mildly indeed, and more justly, 
but still against its will and "to the destruction of its 
nationality, which has always brought civilised Austria 
sooner or later back into the orbit of Prussia. It was the 
fear of Poland which led the one great statesman modern 
Germany has had to lay it down as a fundamental rule 
that friendship with Russia should be at all costs pre- 
served. When modern Prussia; neglecting that advice, 
determined upon her war of aggression, her excuse and 
opportunity was the pretension of her Austrian ally 
to do to Serbia much what Prussia had originally 
done to Poland. The Slav feeling was aroused as it was 
intended to be aroused, and Prussia had once again for 
the second tiriie in a generation made war inevitable 
because she thought that the war could not but be one of 
a facile and rapid conquest over her neighbours. The 
various chances of that war had, by the autumn of its 
second year, by October 1915, put the armies of the 
Central Empires into occupation not only of what they 
themselves had originally carved from the body of 
Poland, but also of neariy all that portion under 
the domination of Russia." It was in their power — 
that is in the power of Berlin, which now controls 
Austria as a vassal— to dictate a re-establishment of 
Poland upon any model they chose so long as their armies 
should still be in occupation of the whole of its territory. 
Conversely, the defeat of the Central Empires when "it 
should come would leave Poland as a whole a clean sheet, 
and the Allies might, if they would, devise a policy of 
their own. Because Prussia and her Allies had by 
the advance of their armies thrown all Poland again into 
one, for that same reason a re-advance of the Allies as 
the power of the Central Empires ebbed away in the third 
year of the war, could enter into, speak pf and define a 
new united Poland. Therefore the war to-day is, more 
than anything else, a war for the victory of the one Polish 
policy over the other. That will be its test. That will 
be the stamp which will mark the final success of the one 
party over the other, and what that re-establishment 
should best be if the final ends of the Alliance are to be 
preserved, will be the subject of the last of these articles. 
