Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1927. THE LEGACY OF POLAND

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 143, 14 December 1927, Page 10

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1927. THE LEGACY OF POLAND

The saying that unsettled questions have no respect for the peace of nations was well illustrated by the complaint which reached us from Geneva on Saturday. Poland, we were told, continues to monopolise the Council's activities, and it is no wonder that the comment is heard in the lobbies that the League seema to exist for the sole purpose of settling Poland's disputes with her neighbours. Danzig, Vilna, Upper Silesia, and the Corridor—what a complication of Alsace-Lorraines, unguaranteed by any Treaty of Locarno, do they .and the adjoining territories represent! What a legacy of trouble not so much from the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 as from a much further distant past! The unsettled questions which are making Poland unpopular at Geneva have their roots in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, and our impatience will be tempered by charity if we recall that Poland's only share in the revolutionary changes which were then effected was that of a victim. The First Partition of Poland in 1772, though but little regarded at the time, was one of the great crimes of history. In 1793 it was far exceeded in villainy by the Second. Two years later the three robber Powers—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—completed their job by the Third Partition, which wiped Poland right off th,e map and divided the last remnants of her territory among the contracting parties. -■■ No wise or honest man, wrote Burke at the time, can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it ( to all countries at some future date. The annihilation of the Polish nationality, wrote Mr. Herbert Fisher shortly bofore the World War, has probably done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were first founded. Some instalments of the "great mischief to all countries"' which Burke had prognosticated from this great international crime had been realised from time to time, but without ignoring a number of contributing causes we may probably say that it was consummated in the years 1914-1918. In 1848, and at other times, the thrones of Europe had'felt the insecurity of which Mr. Fisher speaks, but may we not regard it as a signal act of retributive justice that the three great monarchies which had combined to annihilate the nationality of Poland were themselves annihilated in the furnace of the same great struggle, and that a new Poland has sprung to life from their ashes? In a storybook such a resurrection, following more than a century of oppression, humiliation, and suffering, would have surely meant that the nation concerned lived happily and in peace with its neighbours for ever afterwards, but in real life such things do not happen. "Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward," and the very fact that through the crimes of others Poland has suffered an indefinite amount of trouble .beyond what she may be reasonably supposed to have been born to means that she is suffering acutely still, and therefore making things very unpleasant for herself, her neighbours, and the guardians of the peace of Europe. If even the most favoured of the nations engaged in the Great War have not yet recovered from its effects, it is plainly the height of unreason to expect that after a tragedy covering more than three generations, in which that war has merely been the last act, Poland should settle down at once in peace and quietness. After the lapse of so many years the vested interests of one kind or other that have had time to grow up and the complications of other changed conditions obviously make the problem of restoration one of the most difficult imaginable. What on the face of it could have been a more hopelessly insecure and provocative arrangement than the so-called Corridor by which Germany has been cut in two in order that Poland may have access to the Baltic? Yet in so doing the peace-makers have merely put East Prussia in the detached position which it occupied before the eighteenth century brigands got to work, and to have thus restored to Poland the ' sea frontage without which her national development would be hopelessly handicapped. The Free City of Danzig, governed by a local executive and Legislature under the protection of the League of Nations, and its harbour managed by a mixed board of Poles and Danzigers under a neutral President, presents another complex of delicate problems. Neither Danzig nor the Corridor appears to have been under review at the recent sitting of the Council of the League. Its attention was monopolised by the strained relations between Poland and Lithuania, and even after the gravest issue of all had been excluded the Council found the task quite difficult enough. By a Peace Treaty made between the

Soviet Russia and Lithuania on the 12th July, 1920, Vilna was ceded to Lithuania, but on the day before the treaty was to come into force an independent Polish commander seized the city. His action was formally disavowed by the Polish Government, but the city was not given up, and in defiance of their agreement with Lithuania and the authority of the League, they have remained in possession ever since! Here is a problem which will demand a peaceful or a warlike settlement some day, but it was too hot for the Council to tackle last week. There was, however, enough left to allow both parties to talk of a "state of war," and that talk has been stopped. The terms of an unexpected last-min-ute settlement were as follow:— Poland guarantees the independence and integrity of Lithuania. The "state of war" is to cease, while Lithuania maintains her reservation concerning the right to Vilna, and the Council recommends the. two Governments to enter into direct negotiations with a, view to^ establishing normal relations. Vilna stands over, and time and patience are to be applied to the settlement of the issues immediately in dispute. The chief value of the Geneva agree- j ment, says the "Morning Post," is that it affords time for reasonable deliberation. And that perhaps is also the chief value of the League—to bring- the parties together, and to induce them to settle their differences by time and patience and reason instead of war.