"POLAND NOT AGGRESSOR AGAINST RUSSIA"-PROF. LORD

"There are two wide-spread ideas about the war between Poland and Bolshevik Russia which I believe are not well founded," said Professor Robert H. Lord '06, in a recent interview for the CRIMSON. Professor Lord has returned recently from a few months visit in Poland, where he had an opportunity to study at first hand the recent Polish war. He is a co-author with Dean Haskins of the book lately published by the Harvard Press: "Some Problems of the Peace Conference."

"In the first place it is said that the war was started by an aggression of Poland against Russia, and secondly that in this war Poland has been pursuing an exaggerated and reprehensible imperialistic policy.

"The first view has received a kind of sanction from what seem to me some very unfair statements of Mr. Lloyd George in which he has accused Poland of being the aggressor. The people who make this charge usually try to prove it by pointing to the Polish expedition to Kiev last May and seem to imagine that the war began with this expedition, and that Poland thereby needlessly and wantonly challenged Russia.

Continuous War Since 1918.

"As a matter of fact, the expedition to Kiev was only one episode in a war which has been going on since December, 1918. The contest started almost as soon as the Polish state came into existence; and as soon as the Germans retired from the occupied district, thus allowing the Bolshevik and the Poles to come in contact. It was started by an invasion of Polish-speaking territory by the Bolsheviks, who at that moment were eager to break through into German territory, and expected to meet little resistance from the newly formed and quite unarmed Poland. Thus the war was forced on the Poles and was not of their own making. In the long course of the operations that have since taken place, the expedition of Kiev was only one of those offensive strokes that any belligerent state is likely to undertake when it wants to force its adversary to peace."

In refuting the second charge, Professor Lord said, "The charge that the Poles have been conducting the war for wildly imperialistic aims is usually backed up by referring to the demands made by the Polish government from time to time for a frontier in the east far beyond the ethnographic boundaries of Poland. It is often said that the Poles are trying to swallow up millions of White Russians, Lithuanians, and other alien elements.

Vilna Not a Lithuanian City

"I doubt very much, however, whether the newspapers or the people making these charges against Poland have any definite knowledge as to the very complex racial character of the territories demanded by Poland. They talk about Vilna, so warmly claimed by the Poles, as if it were a Lithuanian city to which Poland had no right. As a matter of fact, there are only two thousand Lithuanians in the city, while the Poles are over fifty per cent of the population. The whole district surrounding it is overwhelmingly Polish.

"Similarly, people often talk as if the so-called White Russians were an integral part of the Russian nation, regarding it a crime for Poland to lay any claim to any part of this population. In fact, however, the White Russians are a people who religiously, linguistically, historically, and geographically, stand midway between the Poles and the Russians, having quite as many ties with their western neighbors as with their eastern ones. They are a very ignorant people with almost no consciousness of nationality at all. When you ask one of them to what nation he belongs, he is likely to answer 'I am a Catholic' or 'I am an Orthodox.' Among such people religion is about the best criterion of natural affiliations.

Polish the Language of White Russia.

"While the eastern section of the White Russians are Orthodox, the western portion of them are strictly Catholic. These latter hear only Polish preached in their churches, and Polish is the language of the prayer books and the religious literature, which is the only thing that most of them read if they read at all. Moreover, Polish is the language of the educated people throughout the country. It is the language that everybody speaks as soon as he begins to rise in the world. In the towns of western White Russia the non-Jewish population is usually Polish, while throughout this section of the country there are no real Russians at all.

"In the demarcation line laid down in the armistice just concluded at Riga, which will presumably be the frontier adopted in the future peace treaty, it seems to me that the Poles have marked out a very reasonable and just frontier. It is true that this line is far east of the line recently proposed by Lord Curzon in the name of the British Government; but the Curzon line was never intended by anyone but the English to be a final boundary of Poland. It is true that the Riga line lies far east of the ethnographical limits of Poland as shown on most racial maps, but these maps were always made on the basis of estimates prepared by the old Czarist Government estimates grossly falsified for political reasons. How false they were is shown by the census taken in this country by the Germans in 1916 and by a far more comprehensive census taken by the Poles last February.

New Territory Has Polish Majority.

"In fact the new territory assigned to Poland, mainly either territory that has a majority of Poles, as is the case in the whole region between Congress, Poland, and Vilna, or else territory inhabited by Catholic White Russians who, as I explained before, are really closer to the Russians.

"It is also true that in the southeast corner the line includes in Poland some territory with a Ukranian majority. This is, however, mainly a poor, wooded and marshy territory, only scantly populated before the war; and during the war it was so much fought over that today it is almost entirely depopulated and empty.

"The new frontier follows pretty closely the old German trench line of 1916, and this fact alone shows that it is an excellent strategic frontier. And Poland badly needs such a frontier for, after having been overrun seven or eight times in the last two centuries by Russian armies, she cannot feel safe without a good defensible line on the east.

"The new frontier does not take away from Russia any considerable population really Russian, nor any routes of communication Russia needs, nor any economic resources of real importance. It seems to me that such a frontier, if it is definitely established, will not injure any genuine Russian interest, while on the other hand, it will guarantee and safeguard vital interests of Poland."