From a historical point of view the American State Department had no ground to stand upon in regarding Lithuania as a Russian province and at the same time holding that Poland is an independent kingdom. The relations of the two countries toward the Russian Empire are strikingly alike. Both lost their independence through the partitions of the eighteenth century, after having been for centuries great and flourishing empires. Both suffered horribly from czardom during the nineteenth century. Both were battle-grounds during the late war. Commander Gade, an American reserve naval officer who represented us in the Baltic provinces, justified the non-recognition policy on practical economic grounds. He maintained that these countries could not exist independently, and ought not be to encouraged in their aspirations for nationhood, because Russia needs them as an economic outlet to the sea, while much of their prosperity must come from transit trade. Commander Gade advanced this point of view earnestly and plausibly. It appealed to American common sense, which believed that in union there is strength. But we forget the Treaties of Versailles and St.-Germain. One may have his own opinion about the advisability of the policy of _émiettement_ (breaking in pieces) of political organisms that represented the economic evolution of past centuries. We are committed, however, to just that policy. It is too late to question it. I have never been an unreasoning and sentimental pleader for the doctrine of self-determination, but I have maintained, as a student of nationalist movements, that the effort to limit the application of self-determination to races whose liberation helps the fancied interests of a few great powers is disastrous and makes impossible the establishment of peace. Political expediency is never more than a temporary makeshift. Old problems are solved only by creating new ones. It stands to reason that we cannot in one breath lop off frontier provinces from Germany on the ground of the alien character of their inhabitants and destroy the Hapsburg Empire on the ground of the right of its various elements to an independent existence, and in the next breath tell other, _and neighboring_, subject races that they have no future outside of the Romanoff Empire. Lithuania has a better economic _raison d’être_ than Poland and Czechoslovakia. Lithuania and the other Baltic Sea republics have precedents that refute the argumentation of Gade and our State Department, not only in regard to their right and ability to exist independently of Russia, but also independently of one another.