POLAND: The End

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> Her population had increased more rapidly than any in Europe; by 1929 her wheat and rye production surpassed her pre-war average. Poland was Europe's third largest producer of crude oil, the world's third largest producer of zinc. She had rebuilt her steel industry to eighth largest in Europe, had laid 823 miles of railroads, built 6,750 hydroelectric plants. And although her impoverished peasantry constituted a problem that no intelligent Pole denied, farm wealth had steadily increased: Poland ranked fifth among the world's powers in horses, eighth in cattle, fifth in pigs.

> Rate of increase in her productive capacity was more remarkable than its quantitive increase; between 1936 and 1938 coal production jumped 25%; steel production 25%; zinc production 15%; cement production 50%.

Heartbroken and embittered, Poland's leaders faced more than the loss of their country at the railway stations in Rumania. No trains ran to the destination that they had to face. The Republic was dead. In its 20 years of life it had grown despite the fact that it had only a period between 1926 and 1929, some 30 months at most, of prosperity. The men who divided it talked of the injustice of the treaty of Versailles.