“Russian Poland is a conspicuous example of Russian rule. No measure of self-government is permitted the people. All governing officials are appointed from Petrograd. Lodz, for example, a city which contains from 500,000 to 750,000 people--all statistics in Poland are mere guesses--is ruled by a mayor and four assistants, all sent out from Russia. No city may expend more than $150, American money, for its own purposes, except permission is secured from Petrograd. That permission is rarely given. Petrograd needs the taxes that Lodz pays. When permission is given it is long delayed. Therefore, Lodz, a town as large as St. Louis, has unpaved streets that are ankle-deep in mud in winter and ankle-deep in dust in summer. It has a privately owned and paid fire department that responds only to calls from its own clients. Ninety per cent of its residents live in sties on streets that are mere stenches. “And yet Lodz is the second cotton-manufacturing town in Europe. It is excelled only by Manchester in its manufacturing totals. Isolated on the bleak plains of Poland, at a distance from a seaport, served by two railroads only, it is an anomaly in the commercial world. NO BREAD FOR WEEKS IN LODZ “For two weeks Lodz had no bread at all. For months it has had no meat at all--so far as the poorer classes are concerned. During those two weeks the mass of the population lived on potatoes. “Conditions were slightly worse in Czenstochow, the second city in Russian Poland. Here 90,000 people live. It has no street-lights. It has no attempt at street-paving. It has no sewers. It has no city water. It has no publicly maintained fire department, though a few of the merchants have a department of their own. It is pre-middle-ages in everything--morals, discomfort, filth, darkness, disease, death-rate. Cholera is there all the time. Most of its people exist in reeking hovels, smoke-filled when they can afford fires, wet and cold at other times. “As the towns grow smaller, conditions grow worse.” THREE TIMES A BATTLE-FIELD If the war had not come, these people would have prospered after a fashion. Potatoes were plentiful, and they had few other wants. A woman earned thirty cents a day in the mills and a man three cents more. Children worked as soon as they were old enough. Sixty-five per cent are wholly illiterate. Then--