[10] “Pre-War statistics of Poland and Lithuania,” G. Drage, p. 8. This estimate, if we compare it with others, gives the highest percentage of Poles. [11] These are Vilna (205,000), Bialystock (90,000), Grodno (60,000), Brest-Litovsk (60,000), Schaulen (22,000), Slonim (22,000). These figures are derived from a recent German source. [12] This has now been done, for at a meeting at Versailles on June 3, 1918, the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy, declared that a united and independent Poland, with access to the sea, was one of the conditions of a solid and just peace. [13] It was at the battle of Grünwald (1410) that the Polish armies, under Ladislas Jagello, completely defeated the Teutonic knights. [14] Galicia was little better off than Poland, and the same commandeering of supplies has gone on there ever since; as late as December, 1917, a Polish deputy, Stapinski, called attention to it in the Reichsrat. [15] Yiddish, it may be explained, is not Hebrew at all, as is popularly supposed, though it is printed in Hebrew characters. It is really a Swabian dialect, and 70 per cent. of the words in it are German. Its more scientific name is Judaeo-Germanic. [16] In certain districts, notably that of Kielce, there was a considerable amount of forced labour, for men were badly wanted to work in the unexploited mines there. Similarly we find that an appeal was made to the Pope in November, 1916, asking whether such compulsion was not an act of “intolerable tyranny.” After a considerable delay His Holiness replied that “as a neutral” he could not interfere in such internal questions. But in spite of such instances we shall probably be right to conclude that Germany did not make forced levies for labour to any considerable extent. [17] Too much stress, however, must not be laid on the force of religious conviction in Poland, as the following incident shews. General von Beseler made an order not long ago that German should be used as the language of instruction in Protestant schools in Warsaw, since Germany claimed as German, children who were of the German and not of the Polish national creed. A certain Dr. Machlejd, a pastor of Lutheran theology, protested against this, and pointed out that if it was insisted on, it would be perfectly easy for the children to become Roman Catholics. [18] The _Czas_, the leading Cracow paper, remarks with regard to this Club, “it ought to be remembered that the Club of the Polish State works with the idea of basing the existence of the Polish State on a connection with Germany, that it conducts an active propaganda in Warsaw in favour of that programme.” It is equally strongly anti-Russian, for in September, 1916, we find it passing a resolution that the Central Empires will permit certain measures which will allow the Poles “to take an active part in the struggle against Russia.”