Furthermore, a large number of these Germans have, so to speak, no right to be there. Everyone knows with what infinite patience, vast expenditure of money and effort, and perfect indifference to justice or morality, the Prussian government has worked to fill its eastern provinces with Germans and to dispossess the Poles of a land which has been theirs for a thousand years. The chef d’oeuvre of this policy has been the work of the Imperial Colonization Commission, which in the last thirty years has spent over 500,000,000 marks in buying up property in the eastern provinces and settling German colonists upon it. Over 100,000 Germans have been brought in in this way. Half a dozen other official and semi-official organizations have been at work for the same purpose. In addition, the host of government functionaries and servants in these provinces, the administrative, judicial, financial, railroad, telegraph, postal, forest, school officials and employees, have been recruited almost exclusively from the Germans, and very largely from Germans brought in from the west by the promise of higher pay and other special privileges. It has been estimated that in the various districts of the east, from one-fifth to one-third of the German population is made up of those dependent for their livelihood upon the state--people brought in from outside or maintained for the sole purpose of impressing an artificial German character upon a Polish land. There is little reason to grieve very much over the prospect of seeing this more or less parasitical population faced with the alternative of submitting to the rule of the majority among which they live or else of returning to where they came from.