and political caste, lived in barbaric splendor, despised trade and industry, cultivated the arts of war and social decadence, affected the use of alien languages, and devised institutions of government which ultimately deprived it of capacity for exercising the very governmental functions it had monopolized.

The Polish people are Slavs, and Poland is literally the plain-land, the great central European depression. There was hardly a time when a surveying party Icould have laid down accurate limits of the country, nor a generation throughout which those limits would have remained stationary. Nature provided no obvious. frontiers, but in general old Poland included the valley of the Vistula RiverGalicia, which belongs now to AustriaHungary; the westernmost projection of Russia, commonly called Russian Poland; and East Prussia. All this represented perhaps a third of the present area of France.

Beyond, extending northeast, east, and southeast, lay the Polish hinterland, comprising Courland and Livonia on the Baltic Sea; farther south, the great extent of Lithuania; south of this, Volhynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine, extending to the Black Sea.

We commonly think of Poland as a country without frontage on the salt seas; yet at its widest extent it touched both the Baltic and the Black; and Polish ambition clung fiercely to the thought of a national heritage looking out on these twain windows of the cold and warm seas, with western Europe before it, and the illimitable East at its back.

If Polish national policy had been as vigorous and effective as Polish ambitions were magnificent, the state might have led in subduing the east of Europe, and Poland to-day have been the mighty empire of the steppes, its heart at Cracow instead of Moscow, its head at Warsaw instead of St. Petersburg.

At the time when the cavaliers were settling in Virginia, Poland was the great state of eastern Europe. Touching both the Baltic and the Black seas, it reached

in the west to well within a hundred miles of Berlin, and in the east about as near to Moscow. The extreme north-andsouth length of the country was about seven hundred miles; that east and west approximately the same. It embraced little less than 300,000 square miles, or nearly the combined areas of France and Italy. Only Russia had so wide an extent; and Russia then signified about as much to the Western world as Nigeria does to us. Warsaw, the capital, was almost the geographic center of Europe. The geographic Poland of that day, now restored to its place among nations, would have more population than France, and this number would include, besides the Poles, fully half the Jews in the world, together with millions of Mongols, Turks, Finns, Scandinavians, Teutons, Latins-the greatest conglomerate of races and tongues in any nation, if perhaps Austria-Hungary be excepted.

Indeed, Austria-Hungary gives us an idea of what Poland was in its greatness. We think of the dual empire of to-day as a mid-European jumble of fragments of races, languages, and religions, crowded together in an empire that yet is not a nation; held together by pressure from without, not cohesion within. Poland also was a dual kingdom, composed of Poland proper and Lithuania. In Poland, as in Austria-Hungary, the union was one of convenience rather than of felicity. Whether Austria and Hungary can be held together after the life of the present ruler has been for decades a favorite speculation with European politicians. That same speculation as to Poland and Lithuania was in the forefront of eastern-European politics for centuries.

As Warsaw in the time of Poland's greatness was the pivot on which turned the contest between East and West, so is Vienna to-day. The East at last captured Warsaw. Now it is pressing on to Vienna. The glacial Slavic race is the western outpost of east, forever pushing toward the west. That unknown and unknowable East is both age and youthage, with its power to bide in calm assur

ance; youth in its impetuous demand that it be served. Who can contemplate Poland's fate of yesterday and not forecast the future of Austria-Hungary? Who, visioning the sweep of these huge forces through the centuries behind, and projecting it just a little way into the tomorrows, can feel assurance that the world is fighting its last great war?

Some ethnologists claim to find the earliest Poles in a Slavic people along the Vistula in the second century of our era. History safely identifies them only six or seven centuries later as an agricultural people, with those institutions of communism in the soil, patriarchal authority in the family, and democracy in the small community that were characteristic of all the Slavs. There is a legend of a good peasant King Piast, putative progenitor of Poland's rulers for many generations.

Under King Mieczyslaw, in the latter half of the tenth century, the country was converted to Christianity, and claimed as tributary to that German Empire which yet survived in some of the greatness Charlemagne had won for it. But Germany relinquished the claim, and Boleslaus, the next king in Poland, was saluted as equal by a German Otto, who in sign of their kingly equality gave Boleslaus the lance of a good old saint. As proof of Poland's rightful status among the kingdoms, they will still show this lance to visitors in the cathedral at Cracow.

Boleslaw conquered most of the western Slavs; he and his successors warred constantly with Russia, and a later King Boleslaus fell into a quarrel with Pope Gregory VII, who placed the kingdom under an interdict, so that several successive kings in Poland were refused recognition as such by Rome. For generations an almost constant warfare was carried on by the Poles against the German emperors, who repeatedly tried to reassert their suzerainty; against the eastern Slavs in what is now Russia; against Bohemia and Hungary. The Mongols, then the terror of all eastern Europe, made various irruptions even as far west as Poland.

During this period, down to the accession of Casimir the Great in the first part of the fourteenth century, the political and social evils which were at last to ruin Poland began to develop clearly. The peasants were extremely miserable, because the nobility were warring among themselves when there was no convenient foreign enemy to oppose. The nobles held the land, but were too busy with their feuds to develop it. No noble might engage in trade or industry. The peasants had been originally divided into two classes, those who were mere chattels attached to the land, and those of better estate who were entitled to live where they pleased, even to hold a little land. But the tendency, as always in such a state, was toward bearing down the free peasant to the level of the enslaved.

During this period the Teutonic Knights come into Poland's story. In the Teutonic Knights, originating in far-away Palestine, we see the beginning of that militarist power that is the Prussia of today. During the crusades the Hospital of Saint Mary was established at Jerusalem. When the infidels at last captured the city, the memory of this institution was perpetuated by the creation of the Order of the Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary's. Two other orders were created for the defense of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Knights Templars and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. Perhaps the Teutonic Knights have played the largest part, for they founded the power of the Prussian state. While the other two orders continued in the fatuous purpose of recovering the Holy Land, the thrifty Teutonic Knights transferred their seat to the lower Vistula, promising to Christianize the pagan Prussians, which, with fire and sword and the barbaric zeal of medieval Christianity, they certainly did. When they ran out of a supply of convenient pagans to proselyte, they turned attention to Poland, which was generally in a state of sufficient turbulence to warrant intervention. The quarrels between the Polish state and the Knights went far to break both. Each in

its time was the most important power in northern and eastern Europe.

The great Casimir came to the Polish throne in 1333, and introduced Poland into the European family of nations. He fought Russians, Tatars, and Lithuanians successfully; gave his approval to the organization of a rudimentary parliament; and, because he had no son, permitted the convocation of the nobles to choose his successor, thus allowing the precedent to be established which made the throne elective, and ultimately brought Poland to ruin. For the nobles imposed conditions on the crown, and these conditions they afterward expanded into the pacta conventa, which proved a chief cause of Poland's failure.

We may vision the greatness that might have grown yet greater in the Poland of this time. From the East and the Mediterranean countries came a commerce so rich that Dantzic and Cracow won their way into the Hanseatic League; furs came from Russia; fabrics and spices, perfumes and jewels, from the East. Warsaw was founded seemingly with the destiny of being one of the entrepôts of the world, a half-way house between East and West.

The nephew whose election to the throne Casimir had procured was Louis of Hungary. With his demise, his daughter Jadwiga, a good and beautiful woman, was elected queen. She wedded Jagello, Duke of Lithuania, and thus Lithuanian and Polish crowns were united, and Lithuania was Christianized. The Jagellon family ruled in Poland-always, however, through elections-the greater part of three centuries. The first Jagello reigned nearly half a century. His crowning military exploit was the utter defeat of the Teutonic Knights in a great battle (1410), almost at the identical place where the battle of Tannenberg was fought between Germans and Russians a few months ago.

For centuries Poland was the buffer for western Europe against Tatars, Turks, and Russians; but instead of appreciating Poland's services, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Prussia, and Bohemia

were commonly quarreling with her. Poland of to-day, dismembered and prostrate while East and West fight over her, is merely living again the agonies that have been her part for a thousand years. It is impossible here even to outline this continuation of struggles.

Early in the sixteenth century the liberum veto gained recognition in the Polish diet. This and the pacta conventa were twin causes of the country's ruin. The liberum veto was the power, claimed and finally granted, of a single member to veto all business by refusing to make it unanimous. The pacta conventa took almost all power from the king; the elective system compelled long interregnums between rulers while domestic faction and foreign influence were intriguing to dictate the succession; the liberum veto rendered the diet impotent to give real parliamentary government. Thus weakened within and beset from without, Poland could only be sacrificed.

Yet there were periods when the country came near rising to its opportunities. Under Sigismund Augustus, latter sixteenth century, the nation saw one of these eras; but when he died, Austria, France, Sweden, and Russia presented candidates for the crown, a rich prize. Henry of Valois, brother of the French king, was elected after a long and ruinous interregnum. He was brought to Poland in great state, hailed as the sign of a glorious union with France, crowned at Cracow, and in less than a year later ran away from the kingdom on learning that his brother had died and he was successor to the throne of France. He left a banquethall at midnight, sneaked to the outskirts of his capital, and rode madly the rest of the night to get beyond the country's border. The diet declared the throne vacant, and Stephen Báthori, a Transylvanian prince, was elected king.

Báthori was successful enough in war, but unable to get on with the turbulent, selfish, unseeing nobility, who considered the country their oyster. When he died the country was widely extended and seemingly powerful, but institutionally

rotten. After a period of riots, murders, and turbulence it elected a Swedish prince, another Sigismund. The election was accomplished only after a battle had been fought to drive the insistent Austrian candidate out of the country. Such were the woes Poland periodically experienced in picking for itself a king who commonly knew neither it nor its people, and to whom it gave no power.

During this reign occurred the strange affair of the false Demetrius, a bogus claimant to the Russian throne. The actual heir had been disposed of, probably by murder. The pretender was backed by a junta at Cracow, and apparently also by Rome. At any rate, he had ample funds, and a Polish army went to Moscow, placed him on the throne, and maintained him there for a short time, till he was murdered in an outbreak. Somebody who will clear away the mystery of this imperial adventure will illumine one of the strange pages of history. It is believed that a document in the Vatican archives, if accessible, would prove who he was and what backing he had. If it was a PolishCatholic plot to bring Russia under the Latin church, it failed; but it brought Poland nearer than it ever was again to domination of Russia.

The seventeenth century saw the country overrun by a Swedish invasion, Cracow and Warsaw being taken. The king, John Casimir, was driven into Silesia, and after the Swedes had made peace and retired, he warned his subjects that unless they ceased their internal strifes the country would surely be taken from them by their neighbors. Indeed, the idea of a partition of Poland was undoubtedly seriously considered at this time, more than a century before it actually took place.

The closing years of the seventeenth century saw the last burst of the old Polish glory. The Turks prepared their great raid on western Europe, and in 1683 appeared before Vienna. The Austrians were pitifully incapable of helping themselves, and Louis XIV of France was willing that Austria should suffer. So Poland, headed by the splendid John

Sobieski, who had been elected king because of earlier victories over the Turks, sent an army to save Vienna. The Turkish horde, supposed to be irresistible, was overthrown just outside Vienna with terrific slaughter, and Sobieski made Poland the savior of Europe, as Charles Martel, on the field of Tours, had made France its savior near a thousand years before.

But proud as they were of the glory he had garnered for them, the Polish grandees would not let even Sobieski rehabilitate their country. He lived a dozen years after the Vienna campaign, often on the verge of abdicating in disgust. A weak king succeeded him, who fell into a quarrel with Charles XII of Sweden. Charles conquered the country, deposed the king, set up a new one, and marched on to conquer Russia, just as Napoleon did a century later.

Like Napoleon, Charles took Moscow; and taking it cost him his army. He went into exile in Turkey, as Napoleon went to Elba; he came back as did Napoleon, and tried again. He rehabilitated his fortunes so far that he was able to launch new projects of empire which looked to the conquest of Norway first, then to the invasion of England. He was killed while besieging Frederikshald, in Norway, almost exactly a century before Napoleon lost Waterloo. It is a strange parallel between two men who sought to rule Europe at intervals of a century; the more suggestive, in view of the present-day effort of another ambitious prince, after another century, to achieve what both failed to do.

When Poland escaped from the Swedish conqueror, the Russians restored a weak king, Stanislaus Leszcynski; next, the Germans came uppermost, and placed the Elector of Saxony on the throne of Poland. He reigned till his death in 1763. Then came the last act in the tragedy the dictation by Russia and Prussia, jointly, of the election of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski as king. He was destined to be the last king in Poland, and it is worth while to tell a little of his election. He was a Pole of noble

family, born in 1732, and raised in the elegant and cosmopolitan fashion of the wealthy Poles. He went as a secretary to the English ambassador at St. Petersburg, where he met the Grand Duchess Catharine, already beginning to shine in that process of plot and intrigue that brought her to the throne as Catharine the Great. Among the amours of this marvelous woman none was fraught with more significance in history than that with young Poniatowski.

There seems no doubt that the woman did the courting. In her memoir Catharine frankly tells of her affection for this man and her long liaison with him, which she coolly says might have lasted indefinitely had he not become bored! Not so the lady; though the affaire had ended long before, she as empress kept a warm place for him in her regard. Opportunity presenting, she not only supported him, but induced Frederick the Great to join her in placing him on the Polish throne.

Looking back, it is plain enough that Frederick and Catharine intended to take Poland from the day they set this weakling on the throne. Maria Theresa of Austria came in for a part of the spoil, and suffered the only conscientious scruples that seem to have assailed any of the triumvirate of imperial freebooters.

In May, 1764, the Convocation Diet, a sort of nominating convention, met in Warsaw. The city was full of Russian and Prussian troops, with no few Tatars carrying bows and arrows. Poland still pretended independence, but it had only the shadow of a national existence. Stanislaus Augustus was forced upon the country, and later the convention of electors, gathered in the famous field at Warsaw, ratified the choice. There were 80,000 qualified electors, but only a few thousand appeared. The soldiers of Catharine and Frederick were probably more numerous than the Polish electors, and their show of power insured the result. Under this coercion, the Polish convention elected the last king of their country. Great indignation over this usurpation swept the country. The Confederation

of Bar was formed at the town of that name to throw off the Russian domination. It improvised an army, attempted to force reforms, and was overthrown by Catharine's troops.

Count Casimir Pulaski, a soldier of fortune and of freedom who afterward fought in the American Revolution and to whom Congress has recently erected a statue in Washington, was a son of the man who headed the Confederation of Bar. Count Pulaski organized a strange plot to kidnap the king, right in the heart of Warsaw, at night. A handful of conspirators actually seized the king and got him well out of the city. Ignorance, treachery, and superstition foiled the plan, which seems to have been aimed not at the murder or even dethronement of Stanislaus, but at getting him securely into the power and influence of the patriots.

The plot failed, as did the whole effort of awakening patriotism and understanding among the Poles. In 1772, Russia, Austria, and Prussia began the division of territory, taking perhaps two fifths of the national area, Russia getting everything east of the Dnieper; Austria getting Galicia and some adjacent lands to the southeast, and Prussia receiving a liberal slice in what is now eastern Prussia.

After this rape of their domain, the Poles tried to reform their country and save it. The liberum veto was abolished, but the upper classes had no serious notion of giving real freedom to the peasants. Religious and race prejudices were more bitter than in the progressive countries of the Continent. There were some carnest and thoughtful people who watched the American Revolution, and these guided the deliberations of Poland's Long Parliament, the famous diet that met in 1788 and continued four years.

This diet convened just a year after the Constitution for the United States had been framed. It was marked throughout by a sincere effort to save the country by adapting to it the scheme of the muchadmired American union. The crown was made hereditary, and a very fair scheme of constitutional monarchy was