November 28, 1918 
LAND &" WATER 
I 
that point, for it is important. Our enemies have been de- 
feated in the West ; but in the East and against the Eastern 
nationalities they were for three years victorious, and that 
space of time has had a great effect. 
It is an ilhision, of course. There is not apparent to the 
impartial foreigner any German superiority over his Eastern 
neighbours save that of a more industrialised civilisation. 
But those illusions are strong, and, when left unchecked, 
they mould history. The only way of reducing them in a 
man or a nation is the presentation of a contrary fact per- 
sistently maintained, and by its very existence contradicting 
and gradually dissolving the imaginary. The new nations 
extended to their widest limits, and fully supported b\' the 
Western Powers which have released them, will be a fact 
pressing upon the foolish pride of their former masters with 
the constant force of reality and ultimately humbling it. 
Nothing else will. 
Next, we have the lack of obvious boundaries, the vague- 
ness of definition, which characterises the limits of nationality 
in the Easb^of Europe especially. It is purely a negative 
argument, an^ one which'would never be used save by the 
enemies of local patriotism ; but it has a powerful effect 
upon the Western mind when it is put forward. The Western 
nations are so long accustomed to highly defined and sharp 
boundaries that the conditions of the East of Europe in this 
respect puzzle them. As we shall see in a moment, the test 
case of all — that of the basin of the Vistula— is a very pro- 
nounced example of this difficulty. 
Lastly, and far more effective as a force opposing \is than 
any other of the factors mentioned, is the economic arrange- 
ment of what was so recently the German Empire, and is 
still in its economic arrangement a united body. This is 
the very core and centre of the resistance which we shall 
meet, and it will appear in a number of changing forms 
difficult to seize, omnipresent and million-tongued. 
THE FINANCIAL INTEREST 
• 
If, as the less reputable Press and the simpler of its readers 
assert, there were a country called " Germany," which actually 
had certain definite economic interests of its own, different 
from those of France and England, the matter would be a 
simple one. We should make this clearly defined economic 
entity supply reparation for the evil it has done in its military 
aspect. But, unfortunately, the modern world is not built 
upon those lines. The great capitalised interests, especially 
the largest of all, are not only interlocked, uniting Central 
and Western Europe in one group : that phase is already 
passing, and we were arriving before the war at a state of 
affairs in which the control of great staple interests was really 
international. It was pure accident that one man should 
be Ii\nng in London, and perhaps sitting as a member of a 
British Government, while his brother or cousin should be 
living in Hamburg or Frankfort. They might both of them 
have been living in London or both of them been living in 
Germany, for it makes no difference to the arrangement of 
the financial in^rests which they controlled. The great 
mass of the people to whom reparation is due know nothing 
of these things. 
Now, this international financial force, which is the greatest 
power of our time, is closely interlocked with the Prussian 
system and opposed to the resurrection of free nationalities 
in Eastern Europe. Of the various great States over which 
it has spread its power, and upon the politicians on which it 
relied for its positive influence, none was more necessary to 
international finance, none was more cordially related to it, 
or more intimately, than that of what was but yesterday 
the German Empire. The great interests, textile, mining, 
shipping, the great energies of production and transport, 
which are the supply and basis of national financial interests, 
were organised upon a system which took for praated the 
German Empire and its dependents to be arranged as they 
have been arranged for a generation. 
The economic expansion of this system, through tentacles 
which it has thrown out all over the world, was stamped 
upon the subject nationalities. When I visited Warsaw in 
I0I2 the most striking thing I saw was the contrast between 
the old high, refined civilisation of the Poles and the sprawling 
Germanised industry imposed upon the town in quite recent 
years. The exploitation of the Balkans was about to begin 
when the war began and, beyond it, the exploitation of the 
nearer East had already begun. The control of the sea- 
board was and is necessary to this economic interest. That 
is why, when we come to the test point of Danzig, we shall 
find it acting with full vigour. 
Now, as is nearly always the case when you have a difficult 
task to perfcjrm, the particular task of resurrecting a free 
nationality, especially in Eastern Europe, at once the duty 
and the prime interest of the Western allies — and in particular 
of England — is subject to a test. You may know whether 
you have or have not succeeded ; you maj- know whether 
you are or are not deceiving yourself by taking some clearly 
defined point, one aspect of which would be the mark of your 
achievement : its contrary, the mark of your defeat or 
slackness. The test in this case is not only Poland, but the 
kind of approach to the sea which the new Poland would be 
granted. If we re-erect Poland as a great State, and give 
it access to the sea such as it possessed for centuries, and 
by which alone it can live, wo have done what is necessary 
to restore the equilibrium of Europe. But if we give it that 
kind of access to the sea which spares the enemy and which 
leaves the isolated group of Eastern Prussia in contact with 
the rest of the Germans, then what we have done will not 
last. The whole point of our effort is to make something 
permanent. All these vast evils which have fallen upon the 
world during the last four years have proceeded from the 
fact that the equilibrium of Europe was unstable. Power 
in the hands of Prussia was an unnatural thing, for Prussia 
was not fit to exercise power, but degraded and making vile 
everything which its expansion afl'ected. 
THE PRUSSIAN "ISLAND" 
It is an accident of political geography that the Polish 
race and all its historical traditions occupies a stretch of 
country reaching to the sea, indeed, but enclosing a little 
island of purely Prussian culture, with its capital at Koenigs- 
berg. This island of alien speech and tradition corresponds 
to rather more than half, the northern half, of the province 
of East Prussia. Koenigsberg is its capital. It is the seed 
plot of Prussia and her system. It was as a vassal of the 
Polish kingdom that the Prussian kingdom arose. Between 
this Eastern colony, as it were, and the mass of the German 
nations to the west lies a broad, unbroken beIt.,of purely 
Polish land, and in between come the mouths of the Vistula 
and the great port of Danzig. Here is the test within the 
test. Here is the point upon which we can put our finger 
and say : If it sufters such and such a fate, we have won. 
If, from whatever cause, it suffers a contrary fate, we have 
lo||t. If Danzig remains under the rule of Prussia or within 
the Prussian orbit, you might as well not let Poland approach 
the sea at all. Danzig controls all the trade and half the 
political influence of that district. 'There has been a heavy 
German colonisation of the town for generations past. Its 
speech is in the main German. Its capitalisation is German 
when it is not international. There will be strong arguments 
for its exception from the greater Poland which it is vital 
to us to erect. If those arguments prevail that greater 
Poland will not survive. It is our enemy that will re-arise. 
I have said that the second of the three things necessary 
to reap the fruits of the war is a common control of the 
two gates of entry to the Baltic and to the Black Sea. Before 
the war, the one was entirely in the hands of what was then 
the German Empire, the other in the hands of the Turkish 
Government, which was in the main under German control. 
Tt goes without saying that such a state of affairs has ceased 
with the victory of the AlHes. We certainly shall not permit, 
in the paper of the treaty; at least, when it is signed, the 
continued control of either of these avenues in such hands. 
Indeed, the power which originally exercised that control 
has ceased to be. But the danger lies in leaving either of 
these entries politically and even nominally in particular 
hands. Take the case of the Kiel Canal. If the country 
upon either side of the Kiel Canal is politically controlled 
for civil purposes by a German State, we have no guarantee 
of the permanent international use thereof. In other words, 
there must not only be international committees to act as 
the executive of the common control of these waterways : 
there must also be garrisons, and the civil government of 
the land about them must also be in the hands of an inter- 
national executive. Vast as are the economic interests con- 
cerned here, the political interests are greater still. If 
Western Europe has not full, free, and continued use of the 
Kiel Canal the Baltic will necessarily remain in the control of 
the German States to the south of it, and two of the Scan- 
dinavian countries, at least, will fall back into their old orbit. 
The position of the canal involves, through rapidity of transit, 
control over the natural waterways to the north. It cuts 
off Poland in any moment of crisis. It cuts off whatever 
may arise as a State in Northern and Central Russia. 
The case of the Bosphorus is too well known to need 
analysis. Economically, it is of greater importance than the 
gate of the Baltic. It is the door to one of our granaries 
and to one of our oil supplies. But there is a political side 
to it which is a new side : the gates of the Black Sea 
will be the connection by which the Western Powers 
