POLAND: The End

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Record. Austria and Czecho-Slovakia did not fight and received no mercy; Poland fought. The third European republic to end within the last year and a half, it had much to fight for. Finicky Westerners complained that Poland's democracy was superficial, Leftists bedazzled by propaganda about collective farms sympathized with its poor peasantry. But Poland had a record of social progress which, in terms of her initial difficulties, seemed as imposing as those of Europe's totalitarian States. Its Sejm, or Parliament, looked feeble compared to London or Washington. But it was Jeffersonian compared to the drilled and subservient Parliaments of Moscow, Rome and Berlin. Its foreign policy looked a little shifty, but it was clear as a brook compared with the secret diplomacy of Communist and Fascist States. Its finances looked troubled—but not in comparison with Germany's blocked marks and Russia's financial somersaults. Poland subsidized no agents to pose as friends of the workingman in foreign countries; except for its desperate seizure of Teschen when Germany dismembered Czecho-Slovakia, it grabbed no neighbor's property. Although vague stones in left-wing and Fascist papers long spoke of Poland's aggressive aims, Poland's history was peaceful. It was denounced as "semi-Fascist" by Russia, as barbarous by Germany, who joined forces barbarously to destroy it.

Fascist Germany had the rebuilding of 15 years of Republican Germany to take advantage of when Fascists seized power; Poland's rulers inherited ruins. Communist Russia had immeasurably vaster resources to begin with, and her rulers had the total confiscated wealth of the nation. But when Poland was set up at the end of World War I the area it took over had lost:

> 1,800,000 buildings, 2,000,000 cattle, 1.000,000 horses, 1,500,000 sheep and goats. Half of all its bridges—7,500—were destroyed, as well as 940 railway stations. All of the rolling stock of the railways in Russian Poland had been stolen, as well as 4,259 electric motors and 3,844 tooling machines.

> More completely devastated than any country except Belgium, Poland had 11,000,000 acres of farm land put out of use, lost 6,000,000 acres of forest. Her textile industry was smashed, foundries and steel works shut down. War with Bolshevik Russia lasted two years after the general peace.

Not until 1920 did Pilsudski insure Polish independence by smashing Russia's invasion; not until 1926 was Poland's political regime stable and its budget balanced. Thus Poland had only 13 years of reconstruction. Ten of them were years of bitter, world-wide depression. In these years:

> Poland reduced illiteracy from 33% to 15%. In the regions formerly held by Russia, where 80% were illiterate, all but 18% had been taught to read, Poland had 15 times as many schools as before the war, had 30,000 elementary schools that enrolled 5,000,000 students, 2,000 high schools, 27 universities.

> Besides an Army, she had built a Navy of 18 warships; built a merchant marine from nothing to 112,600 tons; built the port of Gdynia on the Baltic from a town of 400 in 1923 to one of 150,000 in 1939; purchased 6,000,000 acres from large landowners to create 700,000 new farms in a broad and progressive program of land distribution.