Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/153

 the Polish nation which had been torn into three parts. This feeling would also have become dominant in Galicia, which always shared the sentiments of the Polish nation and remained an alien to Austria. If we left Poland to Germany, this would mean the painful enslavement of the Poles, which frightened them more than Russian tyranny. They would merely exchange a Slav ruler for a German one who was stronger, and with whom they had had more serious encounters in the last decade than with their Russian ruler. A new division of Poland between Austria-Hungary and Germany would only have been a repetition of the historic crime, and would justify the accusations that were brought against us, and foster revolutionary tendencies at a time when the danger of revolution was imminent anyhow. We would have acquired one of the bitterest enemies in one of the most important theatres of war, instead of obtaining a friend.

If we had made the attempt of converting the Government of Warsaw into an independent country, we we would only have created artificially a beehive of Irridentism. The only object for a country that was so small and so incapable of supporting her own existence was necessarily liberation and alliance. We would have created for ourselves a new Serbia, with the difference that the unity of the Polish people was a positive fact, whereas the unity of the Southern Slavs was only an apparent one.

The idea of mutual possession did arise in the minds of the Governments of the two states, which was an