Is America alone in this change of feeling about the small State? Recall all that we wrote and talked about the sacredness of the rights of small nations--and still in certain cases talk and write. There is Poland. It is one of the nations whose rights are sacred--to-day. But in 1915 we acquiesced in an arrangement by which Poland was to be delivered, bound hand and foot, at the end of the war, to its worst and bitterest enemy, Czarist Russia. The Alliance (through France, to-day the 'protector of Poland') undertook not to raise any objection to any policy that the Czar's Government might inaugurate in Poland. It was to have a free hand. A secret treaty, it will be urged, about which the public knew nothing? We were fighting to liberate the world from diplomatic autocracies using their peoples for unknown and unavowed purposes. But the fact that we were delivering over Poland to the mercies of a Czarist Government was not secret. Every educated man knew what Russian policy under the Czarist Government would be, must be, in Poland. Was the Russian record with reference to Poland such that the unhampered discretion of the Czarist Government was deemed sufficient guarantee of Polish independence? Did we honestly think that Russia had proved herself more liberal in the treatment of the Poles than Austria, whose Government we were destroying? The implication, of course, flew in the face of known facts: Austrian rule over the Poles, which we proposed to destroy, had proved itself immeasurably more tolerant than the Russian rule which we proposed to re-enforce and render more secure. And there were Finland and the Border States. If Russia had remained in the War, 'loyal to the cause of democracy and the rights of small nations,' there would have been no independent Poland, or Finland, or Esthonia, or Georgia; and the refusal of our Ally to recognise their independence would not have disturbed us in the least. Again, there was Serbia, on behalf of whose 'redemption' in a sense, the War began. An integral part of that 'redemption' was the inclusion of the Dalmatian coast in Serbia--the means of access of the new Southern Slav State to the sea. Italy, for naval reasons, desired possession of that coast, and, without informing Serbia, we undertook to see that Italy should get it. (Italy, by the way, also entered the War on behalf of the principle of Nationality.)[60]