iberty after
so many years' ill-treatment be willing to seize an opportunity to
ill-treat the only people who (to its misfortune) is in their power, the
only people who have suffered far more and twenty times as long as they
themselves; and the only ones who are too strong to be destroyed through
any ill-treatment? How can the Poles, who were at times ruined as a
State through the treachery of their own men, want to fling out the
accusation of treason against a tribe which has never betrayed itself
and which even in the deepest abasement never betrayed the only Slavic
tribe who in the Middle Ages gave a refuge to its children?

I suppose that the Poles will maintain against this appeal to them that
I, whom the Ruthenians could never bring to make any attack on them, am
now, because of my descent, speaking in favor of a matter, which is very
unpleasant to them. My personal descent has so little influenced my
proceedings and way of thinking that during the whole of my public life
I have been subject to continual attacks in national Jewish periodicals
and newspapers as the man who denied community of descent and supposed
community of faith.

This Spring during my stay in America I was continually attacked in the
American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was
nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at
least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that
I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but
as the suppressed and ill-treated.

I am the man who a generation ago wrote: "We love Poland, not in the
same way that we love Germany or France or England, but as we love
liberty. For what is to love Poland but to love liberty, to feel a deep
sympathy with misfortune and to admire courage and combative enthusiasm?
Poland is the symbol of all that which the supreme among mankind have
loved and for which they have fought."

These were my words and hitherto I have adhered to them.

Shall I have to feel ashamed of having written them, now that Poland's
future is being decided?

GEORG BRANDES.

[Illustration: decoration]

Commercial Treaties After the War

By P. Maslov.

[From Russkia Vedomosti, No. 207, Sept. 10, (23,) 1914.]

For reasons beyond my control,[2] I am unable as a member of the Free
Economic Association[3] to participate in the discussion of the methods
of raising money by taxation for the war expenditures. T