d in the
"immanent justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning
that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
"Le Prussianisme--voila l'ennemi!"

THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919

At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had
become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime.
This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe;
the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit
that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible
and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third
party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national
conscience at the time. The will of its rulers was always accepted by
the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God.
As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply
in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and
there was the opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the Great looked
upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction. Her
political argument that the destruction of Poland meant the repression of
revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in
Europe was a characteristically impudent pretence. There may have been
minds here and there amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only
felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic,
Russia approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased,
at least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.

It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a
great part in Europe. To such statesmen as she had then that act of
brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom. The
King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished
simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much
less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that
time Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and
more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian
illusions. Morally, the Republic was in a state of ferment and
consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social
reform. The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I
mean the comparatively honest (because open) strengt