The attitude of Poland was unfortunate. The national spirit which had survived the dismemberment of the country and had even under desperate conditions been able to rouse the country to the recovery of its liberty was firmly imbued with the spirit of the past. During the centuries of Polish greatness, the Poles had been unwilling to concede any rights to the Ukrainians. They had never been able to solve the problems of the Kozak Host and they had been bitterly opposed to the Orthodox Church. Just as the failure to create a working agreement with the Ukrainians during the seventeenth century had precipitated the disastrous Kozak wars which had broken the state, so there was still an unwillingness to recognize that conditions in 1919 were also fundamentally different from those in 1600. The spirit of continuity was so strong that no Polish statesman could remain in power for a single instant if he cast any reflection on the policy of the old Poland in regard to its neighbors. The Polish control of Galicia during the Austrian regime merely confirmed them in the consciousness of their own rectitude. The proclamation of the Republic of Western Ukraine in 1918 and the resulting struggle between the Poles and the Western Ukrainians only increased the bitterness which had been developed by history. At the same time, the brief taste of independence on the part of Western Ukraine had also given the Ukrainians an increased sense of their own dignity, their own unity and their national identity. The ambiguous position adopted by the Peace Conference served only to convince both parties that they were well within their rights and served to make any reconciliation still more difficult.