The Allied statesmen met at Paris already committed to the programme of the restoration of a “united and independent Poland.” President Wilson in the Fourteen Points had laid down the principle that “an independent Polish state should be created which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.” The prime ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy, in their declaration of June 3, 1918, had also affirmed that “the creation of a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea constitutes one of the conditions of a solid and just peace and of the rule of right in Europe.” It may be that, when it came to the test, some of the Allied statesmen, out of a desire to create a Polish state capable of becoming a useful ally against Germany, were inclined to go beyond the limits of these definitions; and that other Allied statesmen were tempted to do somewhat less than they had promised, for fear of pressing Germany too hard and of incurring liabilities in the East that might be onerous in the future. Nevertheless, these tendencies very largely neutralized each other; and the outcome has been a settlement of the Polish territorial problems which, in so far as it has been completed, may be regarded as an honest application of the principles laid down in the Fourteen Points. The settlement is necessarily incomplete because the Conference could make definitive arrangements only with regard to Prussian and Austrian Poland. We were not at war with Russia; the Conference had neither the right nor the wish to dispose of Russian territory without Russia’s consent; and there was no recognized Russian government with which a voluntary settlement could be negotiated. It was possible to assume that Russia had renounced all claims to Warsaw and to the so-called Congress Kingdom, because the government of Prince Lvov, in March 1917, had spontaneously accepted the principle of “an independent Polish state including all regions with an indisputable Polish ethnic majority.” But it has been impossible down to the present to assign definitive limits to this state on the east, in those debatable regions where the ethnographic situation and the wishes of the population are so doubtful, and where Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian claims all come into collision.[44] Hence Poland so far has boundaries fixed only on the west, northwest, and south.