But granted that Poland was to be restored, what was Poland? What territory should it include, and what were its proper boundaries? As to such questions it may be doubted whether any Allied statesman or the public in any of the Allied countries two years ago had any very definite ideas. Italia Irredenta, Greater Greece, Greater Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, even Czecho-Slovakia--those were concepts simple and familiar in comparison with that of Poland reincarnate. For Poland had been erased from the map so long that it had come to be regarded as a name, a memory, a cause, rather than a country. Poland was a ghost roaming around in the Sarmatian plain, somewhere between Germany and Russia. But what were the limits of its habitat few persons knew, nor what this disembodied spirit would look like if clothed again in flesh and blood. Moreover the problem was in itself very difficult. Geographically, Poland is one of the hardest countries in the world to define. Clearly marked natural frontiers are lacking; or else, when they can be discerned, they do not coincide with the historic political boundaries or with present ethnographic ones. The Carpathians, for instance, seem to offer an admirable natural frontier on the south; nevertheless the boundaries of the old Polish state overlapped this mountain range for a considerable distance, and so does the Polish linguistic frontier today. On the north the Baltic ought to form the natural limit of Poland; but historically Poland had seldom held more than a narrow frontage upon that sea, and today the area of Polish-speaking population touches the Baltic only along a short stretch of coast just west of Danzig. On the east and west no natural barriers whatever are to be found in the vast unbroken plain which stretches across northern Europe from the Low Countries to the Urals. It is true that Polish geographers are accustomed to treat the whole region between the Baltic, the Carpathians, the Dvina, and the Dnieper as one country; to claim for it a high degree of physical unity with respect to its structure, climate, productions, river systems, and other features; and to argue that this entire area ought likewise to form a political unit--Poland. ‘Geographic Poland’ thus defined is practically identical with the historic Polish state as it was in its later period (a coincidence which may be explained as an illustration, either of the effects of geographic laws on history, or of the workings of historic facts on the minds of geographers). It must be admitted that Russian scientists have demonstrated with equal ease that nearly all of the region in question is geographically a part of Russia; while the patriotic scholars of Kiev and Lemberg have proved that nature intended a great part of this same region to belong to neither Poland nor Russia, but to a tertium quid called the Ukraine.