s, will be kept only if those
who make it also render it impossible for themselves to do otherwise
than keep it. For the rest, the question at present is not one of
intentions, nor confidence, nor pity, nor even of interest. Others
have spoken and will speak again, better than I could, of Poland's
terrible distress and of the danger, which is far more formidable and
far more imminent than is generally believed, of those German
intrigues which are seeking to seduce from us and, despite themselves,
to turn against us twenty millions of desperate people and nearly a
million soldiers, who will die, perhaps, rather than join our enemies,
but who, in any case, cannot fight in our ranks as they would have
done had the word for which they are waiting in their anguish been
spoken before it was too late.

4

But, however grave the peril, we are, I repeat, far less concerned
with this at the present moment than with the question of justice.
Poland has an absolute and sacred right to be treated even as the
other two victims of this war of justice. She is their equal, she is
of the same rank and on the same level. She has suffered what they
have suffered, for the same cause, in the same spirit and with the
same heroism; and if she has not done what the two others have done it
is because only the ingratitude of all those whom she had more than
once saved, together with one of the greatest crimes in history,
prevented her from doing so.

It is time for the Europe of to-day to repair the iniquity committed
by the Europe of other days. We are nothing, we are no better than our
enemies, we have no title to deliver millions of innocent men to
death, unless we stand for justice. The idea of justice alone must
rule all that we undertake, for we are united, we have risen and we
exist only in its name. At this moment we occupy all the pinnacles of
this justice, to which we have brought such an impulse, such
sacrifices and such heroism as we shall perhaps never behold again. We
shall never rise higher; let us then form at this present time
resolutions which will forbid us to descend; and Europe would descend,
to a depth greater than was hers in the unpardonable hour of the
partition of Poland, did she not before all else repair the immense
fault which she committed when she had not yet discovered her
conscience and did not yet know what she knows to-day.

* * * * *

THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD

X