Poland Resumes Her Place
Wroblewski, Ladislas
555 educationalists do, and decline any sort of sentimental recrimination about the pure and noble aims of men of science. Many who would despise anything so classical as the teaching of...
...The freedom of all was doomed because of a morbid overgrowth of individual liberty...
...No horror of Greek tragedy could surpass such a merciless fate...
...Mickiewicz, while occupying the chair of Slavic literatures at the Sorbonne in Paris, published, about 1830, a philosophical book entitled Books of Polish Pilgrimages...
...Within seventy years there were three insurrections —all of them drowned in blood...
...Thus the political Utopia of perfect and absolute freedom of the individual within the state, regardless of the needs of the community, had materialized, and, like 556 THE COMMONWEAL October 14, 1925 most imaginary perfections, when applied in practice, it brought about a catastrophe...
...and even if men were all taught to be atheists, I doubt whether mere evolutionism would have taught them to be really spirited and warlike atheists...
...If proof be needed of the infallibility of the dictum that a nation's soul, like a man's soul, is immortal—that material force never can prevail against moral power—such proof has been furnished by 120 years of Poland's life while in physical fetters...
...And when, after 100 years, the sound constructive national forces got the upper hand, they had not sufficient time to carry out their program of cure...
...It is hardly likely to give a special strength to the feeling that some things are intrinsically intolerable or other things imperatively just...
...I do not think that there could be found a better historical portrayal of the intrinsic forces of Poland at the end of this brilliant period of its history, than that given by Sienkiewicz in The Deluge, the second novel of his famous trilogy...
...These vassals were the Dukes of Prussia, of Courland, of Valachia, and of Bessarabia...
...It would seem to me, therefore, that the poor puritans of Tennessee are not altogether wrong, as a matter of educational psychology, if they say that evolutionary education, even if it is not an attack on Christian doctrine, may become an atmosphere very alien to Christian morals...
...The Editors...
...For 600 years, Poland had to resist pressure from the east and from the west...
...During 120 years, not one moment of resignation...
...out of necessity, and by virtue of its geographical position...
...The inevitability of regeneration was an article of faith for every Pole...
...From the end of the fifteenth century, for more than one hundred and fifty years, Poland was a leading power in Central Europe, with a territory twice as large as today, and with four vassals holding lands by feudal tenure from Poland as sovereign power...
...Yet after fifteen years of fighting, she emerged triumphant over all her enemies...
...But wherever the Polish language was spoken, the world war was received with the words "at last"—words which meant relief, hope, faith...
...BEFORE writing of Poland as it is today, it is well to recall a few of the outstanding facts in its thousand-year history...
...Finally, on January 8, 1918, the President of the United States, laying down a definite peace platform, announced in Washington, 6,000 miles from Poland, the independence of Poland as one of America's chief war aims...
...It was about the year 830 that the first ruler of the House of Piast made Gniesno, a city in the plains of what is now western Poland, the seat of the government...
...Let us imagine for a moment a very improbable thing...
...After the doctrine that existence is a thing of design, the next most interesting doctrine is that life is a thing of choice...
...the German steamroller was crushed in the West...
...As early as the eleventh century, the role of "bulwark"—a term recently used so much when speaking of Poland—was first employed in reference to that country...
...Wroblewski, the second of which will be published in an early issue...
...About twenty years before the war, one of our greatest modern poets, Wyspiokski, wrote a drama entitled The Wedding, in which is predicted, with an inspired clearness and force, the rising of this most numerous class of Polish people from their almost passive role to a self-conscious patriotism, often coupled with an uncommonly wise statesmanship...
...Later the eagle was chosen to be the national crest...
...In accord with the eternal laws by which mankind and nations are governed, even defeats serve to strengthen a country if the nation's organism is healthy and cap- < able of powerful reactions...
...No historian will ever be able to picture the storm of intensely dramatic feeling aroused among men in various parts of the globe by the beginning of a new chapter in the world's story...
...But the decline was at hand...
...Let us think of the conditions existing when Poland regained her freedom...
...you ought to have emerged from the slave-state," the slave-driver has only to answer—"You are evolving too fast...
...But it attained its highest level during this century of struggle to save the unity of national life, when the native tongue was naturally the strongest bond of union...
...Poland was flooded by Swedes, Russians, Cossacks, Prussians (the Prussian vassal had joined the victorious Swedish King Charles) and Transylvanians...
...Polish literature ranked among the first in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...
...In this book he prophesies within the next hundred years the rebirth of Poland coming out of a world conflagration, not a possibility or probability, but as an unshakable axiom...
...Such an argument will hardly set in a flame the fanaticism of Harper's Ferry...
...The final effort, supported by all that was best in Poland, and which culminated in the adoption, on May 3, 1791, of the modern constitution, saved the nation and secured the continuity of the process of convalescence, begun immediately after the blow of the first partition...
...One hundred and thirty years after the choice of Gniesno as the capital, the country became Christian...
...The rescue of Vienna by King Sobieski in 1683 was the last flash of Poland's vanishing greatness...
...POLAND RESUMES HER PLACE By LADISLAS WROBLEWSKI (This is the first of two articles on Poland by Mr...
...Many who would despise anything so classical as the teaching of rhetoric are always ready with any amount of rhetoric in praise of the teaching of science...
...I am not attacking the teaching of science, still less the teachers of science...
...I dwell upon this element of the faith in the inevitability of the regeneration because I see in it a decisive argument for the immortality of a nation's soiil...
...The word Gniesno means "nest...
...When a reformer can only say to a slave-driver—"You are evolving too slow...
...Another attempt to regain independence failed in the great tragedy of Napoleon, whose spell had led 40,000 Polish soldiers to fight from Saragossa to Moscow, in the hope that their wanderings would result in the liberation of their country...
...The dissent of a single member was sufficient to cause the rejection of any measure in the parliament...
...The entire work of another great Polish writer, Sienkiewicz, is inspired with the purpose of keeping alive the self-consciousness of the nation by feeding the imagination of millions of readers with pictures of the glory of their forefathers...
...and it is said the city was given this name because an eagle's nest was found on its site...
...The organism of the great kingdom began to lose its strength and show signs of a grave malady...
...Defeats may even lead a nation to victory...
...or, indeed, any manly and combative sort of morals...
...you ought to wait for the twenty-first century...
...The three political powers which had strangled, or which believed they had strangled, the freedom of Poland, fell down while fighting on opposite sides, regardless of their affiliations with the ultimate victors or the vanquished...
...What was the answer of the soul of Poland...
...The initial conquests in Poland of the Tartars, of the Teutonic knights and the Turks, were redeemed in a series of great battles, some of which, like Grunwald, Kirchholm, Kluszyn and Chocini, have won European fame...
...I am saying the teaching of evolution, if it becomes an atmosphere, cannot be an atmosphere favorable to moral fire or a fighting spirit...
...And yet this war brought 600,000 Poles enrolled in the German and Austrian armies into bloody conflict with 500,000 Poles in the Russian army...
...So the final act, the most elaborately cruel act of the long drama, the killing of brothers serving one oppressor by brothers serving another oppressor, develops into a triumphal prologue, into the wakening of the nation from its temporary death...
...The day of August 6, 1914, came...
...After Woodrow Wilson had spoken, New Poland became an unescapable reality for the whole world...
...and that of the Germans from the west...
...There are two outstanding instances of this remarkable connection between literature and the national life of Poland...
...It was the worship of individualism which led in the political field to the "liberum veto"—an institution by which a single individual could bring the entire machinery of state to a standstill...
...So it was with Poland down to the middle of the seventeenth century...
...During that time, three empires—the Russian, the German, and the Austrian—representing 250,000,000 inhabitants and maintaining two-thirds of all the armies of the world, endeavored to kill in a more or less clever way, Poland's national conscience...
...We will suppose that the world's conscience had wakened before August, 1914, and that under its pressure, Germany had renounced...
...There were victories and defeats...
...But there was no mourning in Poland on this account...
...The deep imprint that Christianity has made on the whole life of the nation is reflected in the custom, kept through centuries, and still prevailing among the peasantry, of using the words "Christ be praised," as a greeting—to which the reply is "forever and ever...
...The diagnosis of this disease has since been established beyond doubt...
...And it must be admitted that if the power of this faith bordered on the miraculous, then equally miraculous were the events which freed Poland and justified that faith...
...In 1652 the first application of this rule of the liberum veto, was made in the Polish Diet...
...Up to that day, there were, besides Poles, few believers in a free% Poland emerging out of the war...
...To put it shortly, the teaching of evolution is hardly the training for revolution...
...Even now a very high percent of the intelligentsia in Siberia consists of the children of lifelong Polish exiles, who had been sent there after the suppression of these revolutions to fill the dungeons or to work in the mines...
...Everybody felt, everybody believed, everybody knew that those who would come back safe from the war would live to see their country free...
...The great Italian Cavour said—"The four leading poets of the world are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Mickiewicz...
...All these failures, all these tragedies, all these sufferings, served only to stimulate the national determination to regain independence...
...The incapacity of the later rulers had aggravated the internal difficulties arising from the wrong political ideas of the leaders...
...And to see atheists lose their one great virtue of ferocity would, indeed, be a serious loss to religion...
...Can anyone fail to see the marvel of these happenings ? Russia, the colossus of the East, tumbled down fighting against Germany...
...the pressure of the Tartars, and later the Turks, and Russians from the east...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 23
