Such in brief have been the fortunes and misfortunes of the nation which for more than a hundred years has been dismembered and assigned to its three neighbours. Two of them, Russia and Germany, have, as we have seen, made no pretence of granting the autonomy they promised to the people of the territories which they received, and up till the outbreak of the war, Lithuania and the kingdom of Poland have not enjoyed the autonomy that was guaranteed them more than have the Polish inhabitants of Posen or Royal Prussia. In both cases the policy of the annexing nations has been to absorb, to merge, to kill the consciousness of separate nationality. As far as legal disabilities, lingual suppression, religious bondage go, they have done their utmost. But it is one thing to stifle the expressions of national feeling, and quite another to extinguish the spirit that animates them, and in that regard they have signally failed. Austria alone for the last fifty years has acquitted herself of her obligations, and has granted to Galicia a fair equality of rights with the other races who compose her patch-work Empire, and a reasonable measure of autonomy. But it is not equality of rights among the subjects of different nations that the Polish National spirit desires. It does not ask for decent treatment at the hands of Germany or Russia or Austria. What it demands, and what the governments of the Entente have repeatedly promised it, is that it should be reunited and independent: it does not crave indulgence, but its due. On the grounds of the rights of smaller nations to exist, it claims that the territories into which Germany, Russia and Austria have divided it, should be reunited into a sovereign and independent state. But it is not merely as an act of belated justice that the Allies have insisted both in separate and in joint pronouncements on the execution of this: had there been, for instance, no European war, for other reasons, it cannot be supposed that any of them would have provoked it in order to give Poland the rights which they now claim for her. The significance of Poland to them is in relation to the menace of Germany’s Mittel-Europa policy. CHAPTER III POLAND AND THE ENTENTE