ive their victim
its inconvenient and almost shocking obstinacy in keeping alive. They
had tried moral assassination before and with some small measure of
success, for, indeed, the Polish question, like all living reproaches,
had become a nuisance. Given the wrong, and the apparent impossibility
of righting it without running risks of a serious nature, some moral
alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its
misfortunes on its own head by its own sins. That theory, too, had been
advanced about Poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin and
folly), and it made some way in the world at different times, simply
because good care was taken by the interested parties to stop the mouth
of the accused. But it has never carried much conviction to honest
minds. Somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of view as to the Force
of Lies and against all the power of falsified evidence, truth often
turns out to be stronger than calumny. With the course of years,
however, another danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally from the
new political alliances dividing Europe into two armed camps. It was the
danger of silence. Almost without exception the Press of Western Europe
in the twentieth century refused to touch the Polish question in any
shape or form whatever. Never was the fact of Polish vitality more
embarrassing to European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland's
resurrection.

When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the
proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that invincible soul
of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so arrogantly
denying for more than a century. Perhaps in the whole record of human
transactions there have never been performances so brazen and so vile as
the manifestoes of the German Emperor and the Grand Duke Nicholas of
Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human
heart and intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were
flung into the face of historical truth. It was like a scene in a
cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort
unfathomable by the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be
so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment. At that time,
and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in Poland, and
I remember perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out,
the confidence in the moral tur