Complete Works

people?) and who always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair above their heads.
    Perhaps a different attitude would have checked German self-confidence, and her overgrown militarism would have died from the excess of its own strength.  What would have been then the moral state of Europe it is difficult to say.  Some other excess would probably have taken its place, excess of theory, or excess of sentiment, or an excess of the sense of security leading to some other form of catastrophe; but it is certain that in that case the Polish question would not have taken a concrete form for ages.  Perhaps it would never have taken form!  In this world, where everything is transient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by vanishing out of old mansions, out of men’s consciences.  Progress of enlightenment, or decay of faith?  In the years before the war the Polish ghost was becoming so thin that it was impossible to get for it the slightest mention in the papers.  A young Pole coming to me from Paris was extremely indignant, but I, indulging in that detachment which is the product of greater age, longer experience, and a habit of meditation, refused to share that sentiment.  He had gone begging for a word on Poland to many influential people, and they had one and all told him that they were going to do no such thing.  They were all men of ideas and therefore might have been called idealists, but the notion most strongly anchored in their minds was the folly of touching a question which certainly had no merit of actuality and would have had the appalling effect of provoking the wrath of their old enemies and at the same time offending the sensibilities of their new friends.  It was an unanswerable argument.  I couldn’t share my young friend’s surprise and indignation.  My practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political idealism when touched by the breath of practical politics.
    It would be good to remember that Polish independence as embodied in a Polish State is not the gift of any kind of journalism, neither is it the outcome even of some particularly benevolent idea or of any clearly apprehended sense of guilt.  I am speaking of what I know when I say that the original and only formative idea in Europe was the idea of delivering the fate of Poland into the hands of Russian Tsarism.  And, let us remember, it was assumed then to be a victorious Tsarism at that.  It was an idea talked of openly, entertained seriously, presented as a benevolence, with a curious blindness to its grotesque and ghastly character.  It was the idea of delivering the victim with a kindly smile and the confident assurance that “it would be all right” to a perfectly unrepentant assassin, who, after sawing furiously at its throat for a hundred years or so, was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on both cheeks in the mystic Russian fashion.  It was a singularly nightmarish combination of international polity, and no whisper of any other would have been officially tolerated.  Indeed, I do not think in the whole extent of Western Europe there was anybody who had the slightest mind to whisper on that subject.  Those were the days of the dark future, when Benckendorf put down his name on the Committee for the Relief of Polish Populations driven by the Russian armies into the heart of Russia, when the Grand Duke Nicholas (the gentleman who advocated a St. Bartholomew’s Night for the suppression of Russian liberalism) was displaying his “divine” (I have read the very word in an English newspaper of standing) strategy in the great retreat, where Mr. Iswolsky carried himself haughtily on the banks of the Seine; and it was beginning to dawn upon certain people there that he was a greater nuisance even than the Polish question.
    But there is no use in talking about all that.  Some clever person has said that it is always the unexpected that happens, and on a calm and dispassionate survey the world does appear mainly to one as a scene of miracles.  Out of Germany’s strength, in whose purpose so many people refused to believe, came Poland’s opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected to believe.  Out of Russia’s collapse emerged that forbidden thing, the Polish independence, not as a vengeful figure, the retributive shadow of the crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to get rid of — a political necessity