ould not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw as clearly as my
interlocutor the impossibility of the faintest sympathetic bond between
Poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the future. The only
course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is the elaboration,
establishment, and preservation of the most correct method of political
relations with neighbours to whom Poland's existence is bound to be a
humiliation and an offence. Calmly considered it is an appalling task,
yet one may put one's trust in that national temperament which is so
completely free from aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the
foundations of all hope. The success of renewed life for that nation
whose fate is to remain in exile, ever isolated from the West, amongst
hostile surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its
problems by its distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their
democratic development must recognise the moral and intellectual kinship
of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation, which was the
only basis of Polish culture.

Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final organisation of
Germany, the old hostility must remain unappeased, the fundamental
antagonism must endure for years to come. The Crime of the Partition was
committed by autocratic Governments which were the Governments of their
time; but those Governments were characterised in the past, as they will
be in the future, by their people's national traits, which remain utterly
incompatible with the Polish mentality and Polish sentiment. Both the
German submissiveness (idealistic as it may be) and the Russian
lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly
foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether
of another kind, tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and,
perhaps, to an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the
one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old
Republic. There was never a history more free from political bloodshed
than the history of the Polish State, which never knew either feudal
institutions or feudal quarrels. At the time when heads were falling on
the scaffolds all over Europe there was only one political execution in
Poland--only one; and as to that there still exists a tradition that the
great Chancellor who democratised Polish institutions, and had to order
it in pursuance of his political pu