d other
minorities; to accept the supervision and intervention of the League of
Nations, which the Poles contend means in their case an
Anglo-Saxon-Jewish association; and, at the outset, at any rate, to
recognize the French generalissimus as the supreme commander of her
troops.

Poland's frontiers and general status ought, if the scheme of her French
protectors had been executed, to have been accommodated to the peculiar
functions which they destined her to fill in New Europe. France's plan
was to make of Poland a wall between Germany and Russia. The marked
tendency of the other two Conference leaders was to transform it into a
bridge between those two countries. And the outcome of the compromise
between them has been to construct something which, without being
either, combines all the disadvantages of both. It is a bridge for
Germany and a wall for Bolshevist Russia. That is the verdict of a large
number of Poles. Although the Europe of the future is to be a pacific
and ethically constituted community, whose members will have their
disputes and quarrels with one another settled by arbitration courts and
other conciliatory tribunals, war and efficient preparation for it were
none the less uppermost in the minds of the circumspect lawgivers. Hence
the Anglo-Saxon agreement to defend France against unprovoked
aggression. Hence, too, the solicitude displayed by the French to have
the Polish state, which is to be their mainstay in eastern Europe,
equipped with every territorial and other guaranty necessary to qualify
it for the duties. But what the French government contrived to obtain
for itself it failed to secure for its new Slav ally. Nay, oddly enough
it voted with the Anglo-Saxon delegates for keeping all the lesser
states under the tutelage of the League. The Duumvirs, having made the
requisite concessions to France, were resolved in Poland's case to avoid
a further recoil toward the condemned forms of the old system of
equilibrium. Hence the various plebiscites, home-rule charters,
subdivisions of territory, and other evidences of a struggle for reform
along the line of least resistance, as though in the unavoidable future
conflict between timidly propounded theories and politico-social forces
the former had any serious chance of surviving. In politics, as in
coinage, it is the debased metal that ousts the gold from circulation.

Poland's situation is difficult; some people would call it precarious.
She is surrou