Complete Works

a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh-pooh’d ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors.  Poland deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere geographical expression.  And even that, itself, seemed strangely vague, had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime.  What was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold.  That persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to the rest of Europe also.  It would intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of European politics, into the theory of European equilibrium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the doctrine of nationalities.  That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows.  It would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine railleries of Gorchakov.
    As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: “Till the year ‘48 the Polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient rallying-point for all manifestations of liberalism.  Since that time we have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance.  It’s very disagreeable.”
    I agreed that it was, and he continued: “What are we to do?  We did not create the situation by any outside action of ours.  Through all the centuries of its existence Poland has never been a menace to anybody, not even to the Turks, to whom it has been merely an obstacle.”
    Nothing could be more true.  The spirit of aggressiveness was absolutely foreign to the Polish temperament, to which the preservation of its institutions and its liberties was much more precious than any ideas of conquest.  Polish wars were defensive, and they were mostly fought within Poland’s own borders.  And that those territories were often invaded was but a misfortune arising from its geographical position.  Territorial expansion was never the master-thought of Polish statesmen.  The consolidation of the territories of the sérénissime Republic, which made of it a Power of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by force.  It was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a long and successful defence against the raiding neighbours from the East.  The lands of Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never conquered by Poland.  These peoples were not compelled by a series of exhausting wars to seek safety in annexation.  It was not the will of a prince or a political intrigue that brought about the union.  Neither was it fear.  The slowly-matured view of the economical and social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral sense of the masses were the motives that induced the forty three representatives of Lithuanian and Ruthenian provinces, led by their paramount prince, to enter into a political combination unique in the history of the world, a spontaneous and complete union of sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of peace.  Never was strict truth better expressed in a political instrument than in the preamble of the first Union Treaty (1413).  It begins with the words: “This Union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of love” — words that Poles have not heard addressed to them politically by any nation for the last hundred and fifty years.
    This union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights, liberties, and respective institutions.  The Polish State offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal administrative federalism which, in its Parliamentary life as well as its international politics, presented a complete unity of feeling and purpose.  As an