With regard to Lithuania, our author allows that there would be included in the new Polish state two and a half millions of Lithuanians “linked to the Poles by religion and civilisation, who would find in the Polish state the conditions most favourable to their national progress.” Read in its context, which claims for the new state 38,000,000 inhabitants of which 70 per cent. are “Polish in culture, etc.,” this sounds as if ethnographically the inclusion of Lithuania might be admissible. But when we come to look at Lithuania itself, it wears a very different aspect. For according to the most reliable information obtainable the census figures for Lithuania are these[10]:-- Total population 5,728,000, of which 18.47 per cent. are Poles; or in detail:-- Vilna 26.3 } Kovno 11.4 } per cent. of Poles. Grodno 17.0 } The Russian return of 10 per cent. Poles in the province of Vilna is certainly below the mark, in fact it shews considerably less than half the true population, which is 26.3 per cent. But it is not admissible on purely ethnographical grounds to claim as national territory a district in which the nation in question only numbers a quarter of the inhabitants. As for the rest of Lithuania the percentage is lower yet, consisting as it does of 11.4 per cent. in Kovno and 17.0 per cent. in Grodno. This minority, it is true, consists to a considerable extent of land-owning Poles, as opposed to the mass of the Lithuanian peasantry, for Lithuania, is emphatically a country of rural populations, and in the whole of its three provinces there are but seven towns containing more than 20,000 inhabitants,[11] but if the ownership of land constitutes a claim for Poland over Lithuania, the same claim of the Germans over Silesia holds good, for a quarter of all Silesia belongs to six German proprietors. If then on the Democratic principle Poland refuses to admit the German claim there, she must abandon a similar claim of her own with regard to Lithuania, in so far as it is founded on ownership of soil. And mere ownership of soil is a singularly poor Democratic argument.