UNGRATEFUL POLES

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 59, 7 September 1917, Page 6

UNGRATEFUL POLES

When Germany endeavoured to dish the Entente Liberals by giving liberty to Poland, she contemplated a liberty and a Poland not in accord with Polish, ideas. Germany saw that there must not be too much liberty nor too much Poland. A restoration of old Poland was never in the German mind j-a Polish Baltic port was seen to be dangerous, a Polish Posen flatly impussible. What Germany contemplated was a weak, tame Poland, eating from the German hand a small- portion of pseudo-independence, and recruiting an army nominally for Poland's defence but really for German aggression. Such was the net that" was spread in the sight of the bird, and no one except a German psychologist would have expected the bird to be taken in. Consequently, the disclosures of the Lokalanzeiger, whatever chagrin they may have caused in Berlin, will hardly surprise the world at large. According to the German paper, " the entire new State Council of Poland has resigned on the ground that the restoration of the Polish State is too slow, and because of its great objections to the Austro-German proposals for absorbing the Polish army." In other words, the Polish side of the bargain has 'been withheld, and a German side of it has materialised in a way that the Poles would emphatically avoid. The descendants of the people who provided so much of Napoleon's cannon-fodder have no desire to repeat the experience at the nod of the Liliputian Napoleon who has his headquarters in Berlin. The progress of this Polish reaction will be interesting because of the light it will throw on the democratic instincts of the Prussian warlords. Germany is urged by the Loftalanzeiger to "maintain her own safety," and the last thing that German "safety" connotes is a Poland really free and really strong.