Galicia appointed by the President of the Polish Republic, with a council to advise him.  The British again amended the proposal and asked that the governor should be responsible to the Galician parliament, but to this the Poles demurred emphatically, and finally it was settled that only the members of his council should be responsible to the provincial legislature.  The Poles having suggested that military conscription should be applied to eastern Galicia on the same terms as to the rest of Poland, the British once more joined issue with them and demanded that no troops whatever should be levied in the province.  The upshot of this dispute was that after much wrangling the British Commission gave way to the Poles, but made it a condition that the troops should not be employed outside the province.  To this the Poles made answer that the massing of so many soldiers on the Rumanian frontier might reasonably be objected to by the Rumanians—­and so the amoebean word-game went on in the subcommission.  In a word, when dealing with the eastern Galician problem, Mr. Lloyd George played the part of an ardent champion of complete home rule.

To sum up, the Conference linked eastern Galicia with Poland, but made the bonds extremely tenuous, so that they might be severed at any moment without involving profound changes in either country, and by this arrangement, which introduced the provisional into the definitive, a broad field of operations was allotted to political agitation and revolt was encouraged to rear its crest.

The province of Upper Silesia was asked for on grounds which the Poles, at any rate, thought convincing.  But Mr. Lloyd George, it was said, declared them insufficient.  The subject was thrashed out one day in June when the Polish delegates were summoned before their all-powerful colleagues to be told of certain alterations that had been recently introduced into the Treaty which concerned them to know.  They appeared before the Council of Five.[184] President Wilson, addressing the two delegates, spoke approximately as follows:  “You claim Silesia on the ground that its inhabitants are Poles and we have given your demand careful consideration.  But the Germans tell us that the inhabitants, although Polish by race, wish to remain under German rule as heretofore.  That is a strong objection if founded on fact.  At present we are unable to answer it.  In fact, nobody can answer it with finality but the inhabitants themselves.  Therefore we must order a plebiscite among them.”  One of the Polish delegates remarked:  “If you had put the question to the inhabitants fifty years ago they would have expressed their wish to remain with the Germans because at that time they were profoundly ignorant and their national sentiment was dormant.  Now it is otherwise.  For since then many of them have been educated, and the majority are alive to the issue and will therefore declare for Poland.  And if any section of the territory should still prefer German sway to Polish and their district in consequence of your plebiscite becomes German, the process of enlightenment which has already made such headway will none the less go on, and their children, conscious of their loss, will anathematize their fathers for having inflicted it.  And then there will be trouble.”