“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle _differentia_ which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49] On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe. Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years--all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable _Geographic and Statistical Atlas of Poland_, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued. Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic, intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical information, in the works published during the War by the Committee for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published _La petite Encyclopédie polonaise_, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries, Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the larger _Encyclopédie polonaise_, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial development of Polish nationality--in four volumes), iii (economic life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto appeared. A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the _Annuaire statistique polonais_ by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow, 1917.