them against Swedes and Muscovites, Turks and Tartars. Their churches are full of the tombs of Polish heroes, and their fields are soaked in Polish blood. Moreover, one cannot ignore the feeling with which the present generation looks back upon the Polish state of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For most outsiders the Partitions have overshadowed all the preceding period of Polish history. Such observers have fastened their eyes too exclusively upon the deplorable conditions into which Poland had fallen just before her dismemberment, and have concluded that her history is chiefly made up of a tissue of mistakes, sins, and follies, interesting only as furnishing a terrible example of how a state ought not to be governed and of how badly a people can mismanage its national life. But the Poles, while conscious enough of the mistakes in question, point out that their decadent period of a hundred years or so just before the Partitions ought not to obscure or outweigh the record of the three glorious centuries preceding the decline; and in that earlier better period they find much reason for cherishing feelings of pride, veneration, and piety towards that old republic which has been so much condemned and so much misunderstood. And there is much to justify such an attitude. The old Polish state was an experiment of a highly original and interesting character. It was a republic both in name and in fact, although nominally it had a king as its first magistrate. It was the largest and most ambitious experiment with a republican form of government that the world had seen since the days of the Romans. Moreover, it was the first experiment on a large scale with a federal republic down to the appearance of the United States. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this republic was the freest state in Europe, the state in which the greatest degree of constitutional, civic, and intellectual liberty prevailed. In an age of religious persecution and chronic religious wars, Poland knew no such troubles; it offered almost complete toleration and an asylum to those fleeing from persecution in all western lands. Like the United States today, Poland was at that time the melting-pot of Europe, the haven for the poor and oppressed of all the neighboring countries--Germans, Jews, Czechs, Magyars, Armenians, Tartars, Russians, and others. The complications of the nationality problem in Poland today are due in no small measure to the great numbers of aliens who here found a refuge from political and religious persecution. Finally, the old republic represented an effort to organize the vast open plain between the Baltic and the Black Sea--a region containing so many weak and undeveloped races and a region so much exposed to Germanic ambitions on the one side and to Turco-Tartar onslaughts on the other side--into a compact and powerful realm, which was directed indeed by the strongest and most