remarkable changes in Russian Poland, which has rapidly become the chief industrial centre of the Russian Empire.  Economic causes have toned down the bitterness which Russia’s cruel repression of Polish aspirations had inspired, and to-day Prussia is unquestionably regarded by every Pole as a far more deadly enemy than even the Russian autocracy, the more so as the conviction has steadily gained ground that the Polish policy of Petrograd has been unduly subject to the directions of Berlin.  While, then, the Poles look upon the promises from either of these two capitals with pardonable suspicion and reserve, it is certain that to-day such hopes as they may entertain from foreign aid centre more and more upon Russia.

Any attempt to reconstruct the kingdom of Poland, whether as an independent State or, as seems more practicable, as an autonomous unit within the Empire of the Tsar, would inevitably deprive Prussia of the greater part of the Duchy of Posen (except the three or four western “Kreise” or districts, in which the German element predominates), a strip of eastern Silesia from the upper reaches of the Vistula northwards, and a further strip of territory in East Prussia, extending from near the fortress of Thorn along the Mazurian lakes (in fact, the scene of the opening battles of the present war).  Polish extremists, however, not content with these indubitably Polish districts, are already laying claim to the lower reaches of the Vistula and to Danzig as the port of the historical Poland; and there is a further tendency in certain Russian circles to regard the whole province of East Prussia as part of the natural spoils of war.  And yet it is obvious that the annexation of Danzig,[1] one of the bulwarks of the old Hanseatic League, and of Koenigsberg, the cradle of the Prussian Crown and of modern German philosophy, would be a flagrant violation of that principle of Nationality which the Allies have inscribed upon their banner.  The province of which Koenigsberg is the capital is to-day, whatever it may have been in the twelfth century, as German as any portion of the German Empire.  Moreover, it is the stronghold of Junkerdom, that arrogant but virile squirearchy which still forms the backbone of the old Prussian system; and while it is doubtless the desire to undermine this caste by robbing it of hearth and home that prompts such drastic schemes of conquest, it cannot be too clearly realised that we should not only be guilty of a monstrous injustice in lending our support, but should be sowing the seeds of a new and even thornier problem than that of Alsace-Lorraine.  It would, moreover, be a superfluous injustice, since it is perfectly possible to create on broad racial lines a new frontier at least as natural as that which divides Russia and Germany to-day.

[Footnote 1:  Strictly speaking, Danzig, though under Polish suzerainty till 1772, has always been a German town enjoying complete autonomy.  It shares the fame of Hamburg and Luebeck as one of the greatest of the mediaeval Hansa towns.]