M. Dmowski appeared at the Conference under all the disadvantages that could be heaped upon a man who has incurred the resentment of the most powerful international body of modern times.  He had the misfortune to have the Jews of the world as his adversaries.  His Polish friends explained this hostility as follows.  His ardent nationalist sentiments placed him in antagonism to every movement that ran counter to the progress of his country on nationalist lines.  For he is above all things a Pole and a patriot.  And as the Hebrew population of Poland, disbelieving in the resurrection of that nation, had long since struck up a cordial understanding with the states that held it in bondage, the gifted author of a book on the Foundations of Nationalism, which went through four editions, was regarded by the Hebrew elements of the population as an irreconcilable enemy.  In truth, he was only the leader of a movement that was a historical necessity.  One of the theses of the work was the necessity of cultivating an anti-German spirit in Poland as the only antidote against the Teuton virus introduced from Berlin through economic and other channels.  And as the Polish Jews, whose idiom is a corrupted German dialect and whose leanings are often Teutonic, felt that the attack upon the whole was an attack on the part, they anathematized the author and held him up to universal obloquy.  And there has been no reconciliation ever since.  In the United States, where the Jewish community is numerous and influential, M. Dmowski found spokes in his wheel at every stage of his journey, and in Paris, too, he had to full-front a tremendous opposition, open and covert.  Whatever unbiased people may think of this explanation and of his hostility to the Germans and their agents, Roman Dmowski deservedly enjoys the reputation of a straightforward and loyal fighter for his country’s cause, a man who scorns underhand machinations and proclaims aloud—­perhaps too frankly—­the principles for which he is fighting.  Polish Jews who appeared in Paris, some of them his bitterest antagonists, recognized the chivalrous way in which he conducts his electoral and other campaigns.  Among the delegates his practical acquaintanceship with East European polities entitled him to high rank.  For he knows the world better than any living statesman, having traveled over Europe, Asia, and America.  He undertook and successfully accomplished a delicate mission in the Far East in the year 1905, rendering valuable services to his country and to the cause of civilization.

“M.  Dmowski’s activity,” his friends further assert, “is impassioned and unselfish.  The ambition that inspires and nerves him is not of the personal sort, nor is his patriotism a ladder leading to place and power.  Polish patriotism occupies a category apart from that of other European peoples, and M. Dmowski has typified it with rare fidelity and completeness.  If Wilsonianism had been realized, Polish nationalism might have become an anachronism.