Five-sixths of the old province of Posen has been ceded outright to Poland. Even the German delegates at Versailles did not very seriously contest the justice of this award. Posen was the cradle of the Polish race and of the Polish state; it belonged to Poland uninterruptedly down to the Second Partition in 1793; it has always retained a strong Polish majority; and that majority has furnished the most conclusive proof of its Polish patriotism and its detestation of German rule. Posen is entirely an agricultural province, the loss of which will reduce Germany’s ability to feed herself from her own resources, but will not otherwise cripple her seriously. The acquisition of the province will be a great gain to Poland, however, since the Posnanian Poles, in the struggle which they have carried on for thirty years against the Prussian government, have learned to equal or surpass the Germans in the qualities of industry, thrift, organizing ability, and general economic efficiency--qualities which are not too well developed among the other Poles. In West Prussia the problem was much less simple. West Prussia holds a position of such pivotal importance that it has been for six hundred years a battleground between German and Slav. Polish down to the beginning of the fourteenth century; seized by the Teutonic Knights in 1308; voluntarily reunited to Poland in 1454; Polish down to 1772; annexed by Frederick the Great at the time of the First Partition--such is the outline of its history. For centuries the province has been the meeting-place, the point of collision, between two streams of colonization--the German current from west to east along the coast of the Baltic, and the Polish current from south to north down the valley of the Vistula. As a result, the ethnographic map of West Prussia is almost as intricate a mosaic as that of Macedonia. Nevertheless, the general result is clear. West Prussia tails into three zones. The zone along the western border is predominantly German; and so is the northeasterly part, on the right bank of the Vistula. But the central zone and the southeast are predominantly Polish. There thus exists to the west of the Vistula an unbroken corridor of Polish-speaking territory extending through to the Baltic. In the collision referred to between the two streams of colonization, the south to north movement has been the stronger. The Germans have not succeeded in bridging the gap between the old German lands of the west and the isolated German colony in East Prussia. This is the first and principal reason for the establishment of the much discussed Polish couloir to the Baltic.