one of
the most productive countries of the world, protected against the
devastations of the Slavic stream by massive dikes dating back to the
days of the Knights. Still farther up were Marienwerder, Graudenz,
Kulm, and in the low lands of the Netze, Bromberg, the centre of the
German border colonies among a Polish population. Smaller German towns
and village communities were scattered through the whole territory,
and the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Peplin had been
zealous colonizers. But in the fifteenth century the tyrannical
severity of the Teutonic order had driven the German cities and
landowners of West Prussia to an alliance with Poland.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century won the submission not only
of the German colonists but of three-quarters of the nobility in the
great republic of Poland; and toward 1590 about seventy out of a
hundred parishes in the Slavic district of Pomerelia were Protestant.
It seemed for a short time as if a new commonwealth and a new culture
were about to develop in the Slavic East--a great Polish State with
German elements in the cities. But the introduction of the Jesuits
brought an unsalutary change. The Polish nobility returned to the
Catholic Church: in the Jesuit schools their sons were trained to
proselytizing fanaticism, and from that time on the Polish State
declined, conditions becoming worse and worse.

The attitude of the Germans in West Prussia was not uniform toward the
proselytizing Jesuits and Slavic tyranny. A large proportion of the
immigrant German nobles became Catholic and Polish; the townsmen and
peasants remained for the most part obstinately Protestant. So there
was added to the conflict in language conflict in religious creed, and
to race hatred a religious frenzy. In this century of enlightenment
the persecution of Germans in these districts became fanatical. One
church after another was torn down, the wooden ones set on fire, and
after the church was burned the village had lost its right to a
parish: German preachers and school teachers were driven out and
disgracefully maltreated. "_Vexa Lutheranum dabit thalerum_" ("harry a
Lutheran and he will give up a thaler") was the usual motto of the
Poles against the Germans. One of the greatest landowners in the
country, a certain Unruh of the Birnbaum family, the starost of
Gnesen, was sentenced to die, after having his tongue pulled out and
his hands chopped off, because he had copied from Ger