BISMARK'S HATRED OF POLAND

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 4734, 16 August 1902, Page 2 (Supplement)

BISMARK'S HATRED OF POLAND

His arguments summed up, amount to this: “Poles in Prussia are unfriendly to the Germans, disloyal to the realin Statistics since 1861 show that they increase faster than the Germans. We are therefore bound to., strengthen the German and to waken the Polish element of tile population by every possible means.” These arguments, in which the great man vented all his pent-up rancour, were delivered with the utmost eloquence that hatred can bring forth: and a crushing majority at once and in great naste voted a series of laws k } ; P u t down the Poles "An idea.” says the Vossische Eeitung," "was suddenly brought forward, to which no one had until, then given serious lieed —an idea that may perhaps have germed in one sleepless uignt. Thereupon came, one after another, first, that horrible indiscriminate expulsion of a multitude of Poles”—3o,oo0 —“who did not possess the rights of German subjects; then the vote of 100 million of marks to buy up Polish estates; thou the removal of all Polish oincials into rorritories inhabited only by Germans, and the law which abolished the use of Polieh in every branch ot the administraieiii. No fewer than six bills were precipitateU* brought in and as precipitately voted. * one or these forbade any Pol sh doctor to practice vaccination! “I wonder," remarked Windhorst, the leader of the Centre, “we German lymph and German wet-nurses have, not also been prescribed.” That an unenlightened population should have believed, as it did, that the Government intended to kill off al Polish children hv hriod-poison'ng is scarce a matter for astonishment; we may rather be amazed that an enactment entailing so much suffering on mothers, of necessity silent about the health of their little ones in presence of a physician who did not understand them, unless they could pay an interpreter, should ever have been passed by men with any claim to humanity.—From "The German and the Pole,” in “Blackwood’s Magazine.”