Manawatu Evening Standard. MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1937. SEEKING A KING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 213, 9 August 1937, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1937. SEEKING A KING.

Wiiex, in 1935, King George of the Hellenes returned to Greece, receiving an enthusiastic reception as he regained liis throne after an absence of a dozen years, nationals of more staid Powers looked on with interest and believed they visualised something of a Gilbert and Sullivan touch. A King had come home to his people, a republic had become a kingdom again. But to Greece and other of the smaller European Powers, to whom the Great War brought the legacy of a chequered career, such situations are far from Gilbertian ; they are the outward and visible evidence of tense internal readjustments and realignments of foreign relations. There was, for instance, probably a great deal more unconveyed than revealed in the cable message from London last week reporting that the Polish Monarchist Party, seeking to till a throne that has been vacant since 1795, has extended an invitation to the Duke of Kent to reintroduce the rule of kings. Incidentally, the Duke received a similar invitation from Greece before the return of King George. “If Poland had the Duke of Kent as King she would be linked with the world’s greatest Empire and greatest democracy,” the Monarchist organ declared. Poland itself comprises one of the world’s most picturesque democracies, approximating to a United States in miniature. Before the War she boasted a population of only eight millions, but after the realignment of boundaries she emerged Plioenix-like with twenty millions, who have since grown to thirty-two millions. The population increases at the tremendous rate of five hundred thousand a year in an area justifying its claim of being the fifth State in Europe, Russia excluded. Post-war Poland, like so many other of the smaller States, had to face the urgent task of integrating itself into a homogenous entity, for a big proportion of its people were not, and still are not, Poles at all, but Ukrainians, Germans, White Russians, Galicians, Ruthenes, and Lithuanians. To these Josef Pilsudski, perhaps most famous of thoroughgoing dictators apart from Hitfer, Mussolini and Kemal Pasha, imparted a spirit of undying nationalism, which survived hjs death in 1935. In the War years he brought the Polish Legion into being to deliver the country from its enemies, and in 1918 returned in triumph to become head of the State and rule with a clique of officers intensely devoted to him. These men continue to dominate Polish national life, though their relationship to the present Monarchist gesture cannot be determined.

General Itydz-Smigly, who succeeded M. Pilsudski as chief inspector of the army and has been much in the news in recent months, was a Legionnaire, and has the devotion of the forces—which is no negligible achievement in a country forty per cent, of whose Budget provides for armaments to defend purely arbitrary boundaries between such great Powers as Germany and Russia. Colonel Joseph Beck, of whom London diplomatic circles have seen a great deal of late, and a great favourite of the old Dictator, appears to have developed a more amiable character belying his earlier sobriquet of being “the most unpleasant Foreign Minister in Europe.” A Legionnaire and a military officer by career, he has had much to occupy his thoughts other than aspiring to mere amiability. Aware of Germany’s desire torecover the Polish Corridor, he took advantage of Herr Hitler’s offer of a ten years’ friendship and peace pact to at least temporarily ease the pressure in that spot; he also visited Moscow, and there are to-day in existence PolishGerman and Polish-Soviet pacts, tantalising to the Nazi diplomats. It has been humorously observed that Poland “is on the fence — with legs in all directions.” In a country of which the pianist Ignace Paderewski was for some years President, it is perhaps not astonishing that the present occupant of the office, Ignacy.Moscicki, is -more distinguished in professorship and electro-physics than politics, but the. fact that his life has been utterly unpolitical has proved more of an asset than a burden. In a country where politics are flamboyant such an influence may be especially helpful. Doubtless, the unique unifying effect, on so diversified a people that such a personality as the Duke of Kent could exert, and the very tangible results accruing from so close a relationship _ with Great Britain, have determined the gesture of the Monarchists, which cannot be met as they would desire. But apart from this Poland, because of her geographical and diplomatic situation, is destined to be a determining factor in European relations for many years to come.