h them the British Premier set himself to convert him to his
way of thinking or voting. Thus it was against Mr. Lloyd George that the
eastern Galician problem had had to be fought at every stage. At the
outset the British Premier refused Galicia to Poland categorically and
purposed making it an entirely separate state under the League of
Nations. This design, of which he made no secret, inspired the
insistence with which the armistice with the Ruthenians of Galicia was
pressed. The Polish delegates, one of them a man of incisive speech,
left no stone unturned to thwart that part of the English scheme, and
they finally succeeded. But their opponents contrived to drop a spoonful
of tar in Poland's pot of honey by ordering a plebiscite to take place
in eastern Galicia within ten or fifteen years. Then came the question
of the Galician Constitution. The Poles proposed to confer on the
Ruthenians a restricted measure of home rule with authority to arrange
in their own way educational and religious matters, local
communications, and the means of encouraging industry and agriculture,
besides giving them a proportionate number of seats in the state
legislature in Warsaw. But again the British delegates--experienced in
problems of home rule--expressed their dissatisfaction and insisted on a
parliament or diet for the Ukraine invested with considerable authority
over the affairs of the province. The Poles next announced their
intention to have a governor of eastern Galicia appointed by the
President of the Polish Republic, with a council to advise him. The
British again amended the proposal and asked that the governor should be
responsible to the Galician parliament, but to this the Poles demurred
emphatically, and finally it was settled that only the members of his
council should be responsible to the provincial legislature. The Poles
having suggested that military conscription should be applied to eastern
Galicia on the same terms as to the rest of Poland, the British once
more joined issue with them and demanded that no troops whatever should
be levied in the province. The upshot of this dispute was that after
much wrangling the British Commission gave way to the Poles, but made it
a condition that the troops should not be employed outside the province.
To this the Poles made answer that the massing of so many soldiers on
the Rumanian frontier might reasonably be objected to by the
Rumanians--and so the amoebean word-game went o