Poland needs territorial access to the sea--of that there can be no question. But the Peace Conference would probably not have granted her this wish, had it not been justified in doing so on ethnographic grounds. The Conference did not invent the couloir: that already existed and is written plain on every honest linguistic map of this region. The Conference merely recognized the fact, and drew the necessary conclusion by awarding to Poland that middle zone of West Prussia, which forms a compact, though rather narrow, corridor through to the Baltic. There has been much criticism of this decision, on the ground that East Prussia, most of which will still remain to Germany, is thereby separated from the rest of the Fatherland--an anomalous and unjust arrangement, it is said, which the Germans can never be expected to put up with. Certainly it would be an undesirable arrangement if there were any just way of avoiding it. But it may be remarked, in the first place, that this is the only solution of the problem that corresponds to the ethnographic situation, to the unhappy way in which Germans and Poles have come to be distributed here as the result of centuries of conflict. This solution merely restores the territorial situation that existed for three hundred years down to the time of the First Partition. Moreover, the continuity of German territory cannot be maintained without denying Poland access to the sea. Either East Prussia will have to trade with Germany across Polish territory or Poland will have to trade with the outside world across German territory. It is a question of balancing the respective interests at stake. And who will argue that the right of the million and a half Germans in East Prussia[46] to have a land connection with Germany (they will always have easy communication by sea) outweighs the right of over twenty million Poles in the hinterland to a secure access to the Baltic? Clearly the Polish interest involved is incomparably the greater and ought to take precedence. Every effort has been made in the Peace Treaty to assure untrammeled railway and trade communications between Germany and East Prussia across the intervening Polish territory. Further than that its seems unnecessary to go to secure the interests of the rather small, detached German colony around Königsberg. The question of the Polish corridor is closely bound up with the thorny problem of Danzig.