He stood for a minute silent. He seemed to be searching for a more clenching argument, which had escaped his memory. Then he smiled gravely and held out his hand. “I have an estate beyond Grodno,” he said. “It is directly in the line of a Bolshevist attack. Three separate invasions have picked it bare. There's scarcely anything but the land left. At the present moment I am rebuilding it, putting in implements and re-stocking it with cattle. As a man in the know, a Minister of Foreign Affairs, should I do that if I had the least doubt that our peace with Bolshevism would prove lasting?” CHAPTER XVIII—THE PROBLEM OF DANTZIG Dantzig's problem is similar to the problems of the whole of Central Europe; it arises out of the arbitrary creation of new frontiers. To sit in Paris with a blue pencil and scrawl lines on a map was a simple task; to have to dwell within those lines, despite their violation of economic laws, and make a livelihood, has proved less easy. It is one thing to declare Dantzig a free-port; it is another to persuade her neighbours to use her. It is possible that in making Dantzig free, the Peace Conference has only made her free to starve. Here is the situation. Dantzig, as she is today, consists of seven hundred and fifty square miles of territory, and a population of 350,000 souls. Her former industries were shipping, ship-building and the manufacture of armaments. For the latter purposes, while the war was on, the Germans imported thousands of workmen, many of whom still remain. The manufacture of armaments is now forbidden. There is no demand for ship-building. Ocean-going traffic is at a halt; the nations in whose interests the free-port was constituted are either bankrupt or anxious to develop their own harbours. Poland, who was expected to be her largest employer, is too busy with the Bolshevists to be a producer; hence she has nothing to ship. When she does begin to produce, it is on the boards that she may avoid Dantzig. She acquired a distaste for free-ports last summer when the Dantzig longshoremen refused to unload her munitions. She is already flirting with two alternatives. Germany is coaxing her to adopt Stettin as her outlet; she herself is inclined to build docks of her own on the seaboard of the Polish Corridor.