It is doubtful how far national unanimity is any longer possible between the three Polish fragments.  Like most English writers, I receive a considerable amount of printed matter from various schools of Polish patriotism, and wide divergences of spirit and intention appear.  A weak, divided and politically isolated Poland of twelve or fifteen million people, under some puppet adventurer king set up between the Hohenzollerns and the Tsardom, does not promise much happiness for the Poles or much security for the peace of the world.  An entirely independent Poland will be a feverish field of international intrigue—­intrigue to which the fatal Polish temperament lends itself all too readily; it may be a battlefield again within five-and-twenty years.  I think, if I were a patriotic Pole, I should determine to be a Slav at any cost, and make the best of Russia; ally myself with all her liberal tendencies, and rise or fall with her.  And I should do my utmost in a field where at present too little has been done to establish understandings and lay the foundations of a future alliance with the Czech-Slovak community to the south.  But, then, I am not a Pole, but a Western European with a strong liking for the Russians.  I am democratic and scientific, and the Poles I have met are Catholic and aristocratic and romantic, and all sorts of difficult things that must make co-operation with them on the part of Russians, Ruthenian peasants, Czechs, and, indeed, other Poles, slow and insecure.  I doubt if either Germany or Russia wants to incorporate more Poles—­Russia more particularly, which has all Siberia over which to breed Russians—­and I am inclined to think that there is a probability that the end of this war may find Poland still divided, and with boundary lines running across her not materially different from those of 1914.  That is, I think, an undesirable probability, but until the Polish mind qualifies its desire for absolute independence with a determination to orient itself definitely to some larger political mass, it remains one that has to be considered.

But the future of Poland is not really separate from that of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, nor is that again to be dealt with apart from that of the Balkans.  From Danzig to the Morea there runs across Europe a series of distinctive peoples, each too intensely different and national to be absorbed and assimilated by either of their greater neighbours, Germany or Russia, and each relatively too small to stand securely alone.  None have shaken themselves free from monarchical traditions; each may become an easy prey to dynastic follies and the aggressive obsessions of diplomacy.  Centuries of bloody rearrangement may lie before this East Central belt of Europe.