tain provinces of
Poland. So the prisoners further wrote:--

"We value greatly the love of our countrymen and we were touched deeply
by the generosity with which they thought of us, but we desire to
protest most energetically against relief and concessions secured for
us to the detriment of our country and the ancient rights of our nation.

"Do not permit our personal lot to weaken the united Polish front, for
the death penalty can affect us only physically. The sufferings
undergone by our grandfathers and fathers, we will continue to endure
and with the sincere conviction that we are serving a free, united, and
independent Poland."

A few days after they were condemned, the Polish National Committee
sent a message to Italy declaring that representatives from all classes
of the Polish people had met at Warsaw and proclaimed the union of all
Poland.

Italy, France, and Great Britain formally recognized the Polish
national army as independent and Allied, and on November 4, 1918,
Secretary Lansing, in a letter, to a representative of the Polish
National Committee, stated that the United States Government also
wished to recognize officially the independence of the Polish army as a
part of the Allied forces.

The people of the United States with those of other countries are
hoping that Paderewski's great national family shall become united in
one free and independent state. They now applaud this master of music
as the first leader of free Poland. He will help destroy Bolshevism
with its cry, "Death to the educated," which has resulted already in
the death of hundreds of doctors, professors, engineers, and in one
case, the extermination of all the pupils in a single high school. He
will join the other great leaders in their belief that "Economic
development, patriotism, and the ennobling of all human souls alone can
lead to freedom."

To the south of Poland in the very heart of Europe is another new
country, which already has set up a democratic government and elected
as its president,--Thomas G. Masaryk, a former professor in the
University of Prague, now the capital of Czecho-Slovakia.

Professor Masaryk spent some time in the United States conferring with
officials at Washington. He was here when he received word that he had
been elected first president of his newly formed country by a
convention held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Great preparations for his return were made by the people. When at one
o'clock