Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/21

 or why they see in them their ruin, and long for the return of the Russians.

In truth, it is no question for these manufacturers of racial sympathy or affinity. It is a question of fighting for the industry they have built up against an organised attempt at its destruction—a battle for life and death, in which employers and workman have an equal stake. The social problem was acute in Lodz before the war. It is always acute where there has been a sudden industrial development. But in face of this remorseless attack, the conflict of capital and labour was transformed dramatically into heroic co-operation. The manufacturers of Lodz decided that after a fortnight had elapsed from the last normal pay-day, they would undertake to pay certain definite subsidies to the workmen (2s. 6d. to men, about 2s. to women, and 1s. 8d. to minors). In certain weeks the total of these subventions reached £9,000; the weekly average amounted to £6,500. This burden they took upon their shoulders at the moment when their industry had come to a standstill and their sources of profit were indefinitely cut off. Yet the task was an impossible one. There were at least 250,000 working people—^men, women and children—on the employers' hands, and they had the implacable hostility of the German administration against them-^a hostility which paralysed them at every turn. The Germans did not trouble to prohibit their philanthropy. They knew that it would exhaust itself betimes. But the Citizen Relief Committees, which had been constituted during the course of the year, were achieving