Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/9

 which Germany and her confederates are inspired.

Germany has paraded herself in this war as a mighty civilised nation, at grips with decadence on one frontier and barbarism on the other, and destined, for the good of all, to triumph over both. When she talks of peace, she pictures a Germany entrenched impregnably in the "borderlands," and a Europe which recognises in German domination the only power strong enough to quell its feverish strivings and dissensions and substitute an ordered discipline in their stead. In fact, Germany has assigned herself the imperial task of Rome; but, before the rest of the world assents to her assumption, it may be well to examine how she has acquitted herself in regions where she has already won a free hand. There could be no better test case than her administration in Russian Poland, the Eastern borderland which has been placed at her mercy by the fortunes of war.

Russian Poland, when it became the theatre of military operations, was, of course, far from being the barbaric, undeveloped country which the German theory assumed it to be. On the contrary, it had experienced, during the last generation, the same vigorous economic development as Germany herself, and in practice German industry was painfully aware of Polish competition. The German coalfields of Silesia were continuous with the Polish mines of Dombrova and the foundries of Sosnovitse, just across tho frontier, which employed between them a population of half a million; and half