POLAND AND PEACE.
Poland and Peace. By Count Alexander Skrzynski. (Allen and Unwin. 6. net.)
ONE who has served his country as its Minister of Foreign Affairs should succeed, if anyone could, in writing a good propagandist volume about that country for foreign con-. sumption. Count Skrzynski admits that his work "is the propaganda of the truth," and we do not complain of that, while his past position demands that his authority should be taken seriously. His complaints of the wicked treatment meted out to Poland in the past arc justified, and where we cannot agree that she is faultless to-day we lay most of the blame upon her oppressors in the century before the War and on her external friends who have taken advantage of her enforced inexperience to give her bad advice since the Peace. One can see that in spite of the nation's idealism and the material resources on which good hopes for the future may well be based, Count Skrzynski has fears that the spirit of party politics and the electoral power in the hands of an ill-educated democracy threaten great difficulties at home. But it is in foreign affairs that his views give us even more of apprehension and less of confidence. He does not exaggerate the horrors due to Poland's place on the map ; to the west a morose, defeated neighbour whose rich agricultural land in the north and whose highly developed mines and industrial works in the south have been given to her to hold ; to the east the unknown terrors that may develop out of chaos. There is a severe implied criticism of the efforts of the treaty-makers of Paris in the statement that of Poland's long land frontiers "75 per cent. may be regarded as permanently menaced, 20 per cent, insecure and only 5 per cent. safe." This is the excuse proffered against charges of militarism. But it seems to us a counsel of despair, and her dependence upon military force bodes disaster to others besides herself. Yet she finds no other counsel and only reflects perhaps upon her use of force so far. Ifer defeat of the Bolshevik invaders in 1920 may have been a successful defence of her own land on which the world could congratulate her. But the seizure of Vilna by Zeligowski and subsequent flouting of the League of Nations, as flagrant as Signor Mussolini's later, were evil successes. The Polish " Putsch " into Upper Silesia in 1921, when she was disappointed in the result of the plebiscite, was less successful, but an equally evil effort of force. Over these Count Skrzynski glosses too lightly.
Closely allied to foreign affairs are Poland's very serious problems of her "Minorities," the Jews who were always present and the Germans, - Austro-Hungarians, Ruthenians, Russians and others now brought within her enlarged borders. The author admits that in places Poland's frontier is "fixed some 200 kilometres beyond her ethnographical limits." She signed in 1919 the Minorities Treaty. Count Skrzynski sums up his views upon it by saying : "The utility of such an instrument for the solution of the definite problems of the nationalities comprised in the Polish State is infinitesimal." Such a manner of regarding these matters fills us with gloomiest forebodings. Upon the manner in which Poland is fulfilling the recommendations of the League of Nations and the Convention with Germany concerning the transfer of Upper Silesian territory the author is silent. Turning to smaller matters we find here many figures and statistics which we prefer neither to criticize nor to accept as valuable where change has been and is so rapid from day to day. There is inevitably so much in the book about new and old frontiers and partitions that a map would have been a great help to the reader.
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