Complete Works

advantage of by its neighbours to discredit that living witness to a great historical crime.  If not the actual frontiers, then the moral integrity of the new State is sure to be assailed before the eyes of Europe.  Economical enmity will also come into play when the world’s work is resumed again and competition asserts its power.  Charges of aggression are certain to be made, especially as related to the small States formed of the territories of the Old Republic.  And everybody knows the power of lies which go about clothed in coats of many colours, whereas, as is well known, Truth has no such advantage, and for that reason is often suppressed as not altogether proper for everyday purposes.  It is not often recognised, because it is not always fit to be seen.
    Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even awful instances fabricated out of inadequate materials, but it is historically unthinkable that the Poland of the future, with its sacred tradition of freedom and its hereditary sense of respect for the rights of individuals and States, should seek its prosperity in aggressive action or in moral violence against that part of its once fellow-citizens who are Ruthenians or Lithuanians.  The only influence that cannot be restrained is simply the influence of time, which disengages truth from all facts with a merciless logic and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses of men.  There can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the material interests of the new nationalities, which seem to play now the game of disintegration for the benefit of the world’s enemies, will in the end bring them nearer to the Poland of this war’s creation, will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous movement towards the State which had adopted and brought them up in the development of its own humane culture — the offspring of the West.
     

A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM — 1916
     
    We must start from the assumption that promises made by proclamation at the beginning of this war may be binding on the individuals who made them under the stress of coming events, but cannot be regarded as binding the Governments after the end of the war.
    Poland has been presented with three proclamations.  Two of them were in such contrast with the avowed principles and the historic action for the last hundred years (since the Congress of Vienna) of the Powers concerned, that they were more like cynical insults to the nation’s deepest feelings, its memory and its intelligence, than state papers of a conciliatory nature.
    The German promises awoke nothing but indignant contempt; the Russian a bitter incredulity of the most complete kind.  The Austrian proclamation, which made no promises and contented itself with pointing out the Austro-Polish relations for the last forty-five years, was received in silence.  For it is a fact that in Austrian Poland alone Polish nationality was recognised as an element of the Empire, and individuals could breathe the air of freedom, of civil life, if not of political independence.
    But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable.  To be Russophile or Austrophile is at best a counsel of despair in view of a European situation which, because of the grouping of the powers, seems to shut from them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national future nursed through more than a hundred years of suffering and oppression.
    Through most of these years, and especially since 1830, Poland (I use this expression since Poland exists as a spiritual entity to-day as definitely as it ever existed in her past) has put her faith in the Western Powers.  Politically it may have been nothing more than a consoling illusion, and the nation had a half-consciousness of this.  But what Poland was looking for from the Western Powers without discouragement and with unbroken confidence was moral support.
    This is a fact of the sentimental order.  But such facts have their positive value, for their idealism derives from perhaps the highest kind of reality.  A sentiment asserts its claim by its force, persistence and universality.  In Poland that sentimental attitude towards the Western Powers is universal.  It extends to all classes.  The very children are affected by it as soon as they begin to think.
    The political value of such a sentiment consists in this, that it is based on profound resemblances.  Therefore one can build on it as if it were a material fact.  For the same