These descriptions of the occurrences at Pinsk and Vilna are totally inadequate to describe the fearful plight of the Jews. Even the fuller accounts contained in my official report to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace--which is printed in full in the Appendix--does not adequately portray the sad conditions of these Jews in Poland at present. Giving harrowing details will not remedy the situation, and might be misconstrued and do harm to those suffering people. Hence, I have abstained. It was in Vilna that we had a real show-down with the Chief of State of Poland. All this time we had been in the unpleasant position of a delegation of foreigners endeavouring to render a service to a country whose president openly resented our presence there. “Pogroms?” Pilsudski had thundered when I first called on him. It was in the Czar’s summer palace near Warsaw that he was living, and he received me in the “library” where there was not a book to be seen. “There have been no pogroms in Poland!--nothing but unavoidable accidents.” I asked the difference. “A pogrom,” he explained reluctantly, “is a massacre ordered by the government, or not prevented by it when prevention is possible. Among us no wholesale killings of Jews have been permitted. Our trouble isn’t religious; it is economic. Our petty dealers are Jews. Many of them have been war-profiteers, some have had dealings with the Germans or the Bolsheviki, or both, and this has created a prejudice against Jews in general.” At that meeting he stormed against the new school regulations; they would not only ghettoize the Jews, but, and here his real objection revealed itself, they were repugnant because forced upon the country from the outside. “Russia,” he declared, “will return to autocracy: the Russians can survive even the privations of Bolshevism. But our problem is vastly different. We have become a free republic, and we propose to remain one, in spite of interference. The Poles and the Jews can’t live together on friendly terms for years to come, but they will manage it at last. In the meantime, the Jew will have all his legal rights. It is our own affair; our own honour is involved, and we are entirely able to guard it.” Now our Commission was at Vilna, and Pilsudski came there; it was his birthplace, and here were we invading it with an American Commission. Etiquette required that Jadwin and I should call on him. The president was quartered in the Bishop’s Palace. We were received with great formality and ushered through several vast rooms before we reached the audience-chamber. A storm was brewing, the light was dim. We found ourselves in a great big uninviting room, with long windows opening on a large court. War had stripped it of all its ancient hangings; the old furniture that belonged there must have vanished, in its stead were a few pieces of cheap and stiff modern manufacture. There was a desk at the far end, and at it was seated Pilsudski.