23.Poland, the Country That Had always Suffered from Being a Corridor and Therefore now Has a Corridor of Its Own

POLAND suffers from two great natural disadvantages. Its geographic position is most unfortunate, and its nearest neighbors are its fellow-Slavs of Russia.A real feeling of brotherhood is said to be a wonderful thing, but rarely as practiced between nations of a similar race.

We do not know where the Poles originally came from. Like the Irish, whom they resemble in so many ways, the Poles are intensely patriotic, ever ready to die for their country, but rarely willing to live and work for it.The record of the valorous deeds of their ancestors, as compiled by their own leading historians, makes the earliest Polish heroes stow-aways on Noah's Ark.But when the Poles are first mentioned in any reliable historical document, Charlemagne and his braves had been in their graves for almost two entire centuries.Some fifty years after the battle of Hastings, however, the word Poland began to mean something more than the name of a vague territory that was supposed to lie somewhere in the wilderness of the Far East.

To the best of our present knowledge, the Poles lived originally near the mouth of the Danube, were set upon by invaders from the east, were forced to pull up stakes, and moved westward until they reached the Carpathian Mountains. They thereupon passed through the regions just evacuated by the other great branch of the Slavic race, the Russians, and finally found a safe place of refuge among the primeval forests and the marshes of that part of the great European plain which is situated between the Oder and the Vistula.

They could not possibly have chosen a worse location. A man sitting on a chair in the middle of the main entrance to the Grand Central Station enjoys about as much quiet and privacy as a farmer in this territory, which is in reality the front door of Europe and the only passageway at the disposal of those who wanted to go west to conquer the European lands bordering on the North Sea, or those who wanted to go east to plunder Russia.The constant necessity of being prepared to fight on two fronts at the same time, gradually turned every Polish land-owner into a professional soldier and made every castle into a fortress.As a result, the military side of life was stressed at the expense of everything else.And commerce never took hold in a country where a state of war was the normal condition of life.

There were a few towns but all of them were situated in the center of the country and along the banks of the Vistula. Krakow, in the south, has been built where the Carpathian Mountains dissolved themselves into the plains of Galicia.Warsaw, in the middle of the Polish plain, and Danzig, near the mouth of the river, depended for their business life on foreign merchants.Further inland, however, the country was almost empty, for there were no other rivers until one reached the Dnieper, which was in Russian territory, and Kovno, the old capital of Lithuania, never grew beyond the status of a small princely residence.

Such buying and selling as were absolutely necessary were in the hands of the Jews, who had fled to the outskirts of Europe when the Crusaders in their holy zeal had slaughtered the inmates of several of the better known ghettos of the Rhine region. A few hardy Norsemen, such as had founded the Russian state, might have done the country no end of good.But they never came to this part of the world.Why should they?There was no convenient trade-route running north and south or east and west and there was no city of Constantinople at the other end of the long trail to reward them for the fatigue and the hardships of their trip.

And so the Polish people were caught between the Germans, who hated them because, although they were fellow-Roman-Catholics, they also were Slavs, and the Russians, who despised them because, although they were fellow-Slavs, they were not Greek Catholics, and the Turks who loathed them because they were both Christians and Slavs.

If the energetic Lithuanian dynasty, which did so much for the country during the days of the Middle Ages, had survived, things might have gone a great deal better, but in the year 1572 the Jagiellans died out and upon the death of the last king the nobles, grown rich during the many years of frontier fighting and enjoying almost despotic rights on their vast but isolated estates, succeeded in turning the country into an elective monarchy. That elective monarchy lasted from 1572 until 1791 and when it was destroyed, it had long since degenerated into a very painful joke.

For the throne of Poland was simply sold to the highest bidder and no questions asked. Frenchmen and Hungarians and Swedes in turn were rulers of a kingdom which meant nothing to them except as a possible source of graft and revenue.When these monarchs omitted to surrender part of their spoils to their henchmen, the Polish nobles did what their Irish friends had done a thousand years before.They called in their neighbors to come and help them“get their rights”.Those neighbors, Prussia and Russia and Austria, were only too happy to oblige, and Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation.

In 1795,during the last of the three great divisions, Russia got 180,000 square miles with 6,000,000 people. Austria got 45,000 square miles with 3,700,000 people, and Prussia got 57,000 square miles with 2,500,000 people.This hideous wrong was not undone until one hundred and twenty-five years later.And then the Allies, in their fear of Russia, went to another extreme.They not only made the new Polish Republic much larger than it had any right to be, but furthermore, in order to give Poland a direct outlet to the sea, they established the so called“Polish Corridor”,a strip of land which runs from the old province of Posen to the Baltic Sea and which cuts Prussia into two parts which now have no longer any direct connection with each other.

It takes no profound knowledge of either geography or history to predict what will happen in connection with this unfortunate corridor. It will remain an object of hatred and distrust between Germany and Poland until either country shall have grown strong enough to destroy the other and then poor Poland will become once more what it has always been, a buffer-state between Russia and Europe.

In the first flush of victory it seemed a glorious achievement. But building spite-fences across each other's territory is not going to bring the economic and social problems of our time any nearer to their final solution.