The half-dozen Teuton residents with whom I talked seemed rather apathetic toward the sudden change in their fortunes. The shopkeepers, with one exception, announced their intention of continuing business in Bromberg, even if it became necessary to adopt Polish citizenship. The exception was of the impression that they would be driven out, and was not yet making any plans for the future. A station guard, on the other hand, denounced the decision of Paris with a genuine Prussian wrath. “Every railway employee is armed,” he asserted, “and _die Polacken_ will not get anything that belongs to the Fatherland without a struggle. It is absurd,” he vociferated, “to expect that we will surrender a genuine German city like Bromberg to a lot of improvident wastrels. Let them keep the part about Posen and south of it; there the Poles are in the majority. But here”—as usual, it seemed, the section to which they were entitled was somewhere else. A lawyer whom I found sunning himself on a park bench before the fantastic bronze fountain discussed the problem more quietly, but with no less heat. “You Americans,” he perorated, “the whole Allied group, do not understand the problem in its full significance. We look upon the Poles very much as you do upon your negroes. They have much the same shiftlessness, much the same tendency to revert to the semi-savagery out of which we Germans have lifted them. Now just imagine, for the moment, that you had been starved to submission in a war with, say, Mexico, Japan, and England. Suppose a so-called ‘peace conference’ made up entirely of your enemies, and sitting, say, in Canada, decreed that Mississippi, Florida, Alabama—that half a dozen of your most fertile Southern states must be turned over to the negroes, to form part of a new negro nation. It is possible that your people in the North, whom the problem did not directly touch, might consent to the arrangement. But do you for a moment think that your hot-blooded Southerners, the white men who would have to live in that negro nation or escape with what they could carry with them, would accept the decision without springing to arms even though it was signed by a dozen Northerners? That is exactly our case here, and whether or not this alleged Peace Treaty is accepted by the government in Berlin, the Germans of the East will not see themselves despoiled without a struggle.”