Repository: UIHistories Project: War Publications - WWI Compilation 1923 - Article 24 [PAGE 3]

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I rhe then moribund state, while a third act of partition, in 1795, completed the work, concluding as clear-cut a drama of lunrival as was ever played amid the political creations of men. | Students of Polish history find the remarkable ueakncsj s directly responsible for the ruin of this, one of Europe's greatest states, in Poland jrself. Pol a ml is a land of plains, with no really satisfactory frontiers, thus inviting attack by any aggressive neighbor with predatory inclination; a land made through conquest, and ill pieced together, lacking racial homogeneity with its Lithuanians, Kwthenians, and other peoples, different from the warrior Poles in Ian; uige, religion, manners, and customs, never really assimilated, always mindful of their one-time independence and chafing to regain entire liberty; a land of two social classes only — a proud, fighting, proprietary nobility, and, ultimately, a degraded, utterly subservient, blackly ignorant serfdom with no j stabilizing middle stratum such as makes back-bone for most states; a land, finally, with a political system as strangely and completely decrepit as any deteriorated governmental machinery told of in human history: a Republic with ail elected monarch at its head, a kingship reduced, through the jealous fear of possible royal power, on the part ot an independent nobility, to nonentity, to an empty manifest of rule, grasped at now and again even by venturesome foreigners. Full as serious a Haw as this was that curious liberum veto, formerly a staunch bulwark of their libem for the nobles, now an abused institution, constantly operated by th< - utterly selfish, utterly unpatriotic lords of the land to thwart every act of the government. Some writers, noting the dark havoc wrought for Poland by a state of affairs so bad and so long enduring, affirm that the Poles deserved their fate; and these same students, observing the seventeen odd political parties vigorously flourishing in Poland to-day, gloomily shake their heads over this ruinous twentieth century recrudescence of the ancient national malady assertive individuality and otherwise-mindedness — and assert that an

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independent Poland is an utter impossibility. As a matter of fact it is highly probable that Poland could have amended her vicious system, had the time been afforded. Eighteenth century Poland, keenly aware of many of her problems, was indeed striving quite vigorously to handle them; unfortunately for her, other statecraft was at work, far stronger at the time than her own with its. depleted vitality: mighty, uncouth Russia with her irresistible surge towards the attractive west, where alone chance for development seemed aggeil vigorous 3