Now it must clearly be understood that it is not merely nor even primarily in the cause of abstract justice that the pronouncements of the governments of the Entente have stated and reiterated their declaration with regard to Poland. A great wrong was undoubtedly done to the country when by the partitions and the Congress of Vienna more than a hundred years ago, a free nation was divided and wiped off the map. But the Entente did not go to war in order to redress that ancient wrong, though undoubtedly one of the main reasons, indeed the main reason, why they now cannot arrive at some basis from which peace-discussion could arise, is that they will not accept any such solution of the Polish question as implies unlimited German control over these territories. Nor is there any conceivable cause why Germany should yield in this matter until she is forced to, for the creation of such an independent Poland as the Entente demands, will be the most serious check that could possibly be dealt to her Mittel-Europa policy, and also implies an immense loss of territory for herself. The historical claims then of Poland to these territories does not concern the Entente or the objects for which they are fighting. At the most it is a supplementary consideration marginally noted at the edge of the real question at issue. The historical claim is admitted, but it does not exercise weight. Calais once belonged to England, Syracuse once belonged to Athens, but nobody proposes to restore them to England and to Greece because they once belonged to them, and the Entente do not propose to restore either German or Austrian territories to Poland for the similar reason. But the ethnographical reason is a very different matter: the population of these lands is neither Russian nor German nor Austrian, but Polish. One nation inhabits them, and, as a nation, it has a right according to the programme of the Entente, to a national existence, for it has shown itself for centuries able to cohere and govern itself, and it was a series of unjust provisions that tore it apart. And this acceptance by the Entente of this ethnographical claim coincides with the necessity of securing a check to the Mittel-Europa expansion of Germany. It is essential for the peace of the world and the integrity of the British Empire that there should exist just here a strong state that does not lean on Germany, but shall be in itself a bar to German absorption eastwards, and shall naturally find its orientation and its development independent of and opposed to Teutonic penetration. At present as we all know and deplore, there is chaos east of Poland, and to lean on chaos is to be engulfed in the whirlwind. But no sane thinker, unless he believes in the sanity of Bolsheviks can doubt that some day out of chaos and outer darkness a light shall shine again, and a call of a people’s will shall be heard, and when fire and tempest have passed shall come the “still small voice” for which the prophet hearkened.