3

True, the Grand-duke Nicolas made noble and generous promises to Poland; and these promises were repeated at the opening of the Duma.  This is good and shows the irresistible force of the awakening conscience of a great empire; but it is not enough.  Such promises involve only those who make them; they do not bind a nation.  We will not insult Russia by doubting her intentions; but among all the certainties which history teaches us there is one that has been acquired once and for all; and this is that in politics and international morality intentions count for nothing and that a promise, made by no matter what nations, will be kept only if those who make it also render it impossible for themselves to do otherwise than keep it.  For the rest, the question at present is not one of intentions, nor confidence, nor pity, nor even of interest.  Others have spoken and will speak again, better than I could, of Poland’s terrible distress and of the danger, which is far more formidable and far more imminent than is generally believed, of those German intrigues which are seeking to seduce from us and, despite themselves, to turn against us twenty millions of desperate people and nearly a million soldiers, who will die, perhaps, rather than join our enemies, but who, in any case, cannot fight in our ranks as they would have done had the word for which they are waiting in their anguish been spoken before it was too late.

4

But, however grave the peril, we are, I repeat, far less concerned with this at the present moment than with the question of justice.  Poland has an absolute and sacred right to be treated even as the other two victims of this war of justice.  She is their equal, she is of the same rank and on the same level.  She has suffered what they have suffered, for the same cause, in the same spirit and with the same heroism; and if she has not done what the two others have done it is because only the ingratitude of all those whom she had more than once saved, together with one of the greatest crimes in history, prevented her from doing so.

It is time for the Europe of to-day to repair the iniquity committed by the Europe of other days.  We are nothing, we are no better than our enemies, we have no title to deliver millions of innocent men to death, unless we stand for justice.  The idea of justice alone must rule all that we undertake, for we are united, we have risen and we exist only in its name.  At this moment we occupy all the pinnacles of this justice, to which we have brought such an impulse, such sacrifices and such heroism as we shall perhaps never behold again.  We shall never rise higher; let us then form at this present time resolutions which will forbid us to descend; and Europe would descend, to a depth greater than was hers in the unpardonable hour of the partition of Poland, did she not before all else repair the immense fault which she committed when she had not yet discovered her conscience and did not yet know what she knows to-day.