# Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 2/Expulsion

THE EXPULSION OF THE POLES
BY PRUSSIA
The two greatest military powers of the world, Germany and Russia, which are on bad terms with each other, but neither of which represents political freedom, the right of the nation and of the individual to self-government, have at present one task and object in common; with all the means at their command they wage a war of extermination against a nationality of from 14,000,000 to 16,000,000 people, which is tied and bound, oppressed and gagged as no other nationality in Europe is, but which nevertheless is treated by its rulers as if it overflowed or crushed out the elements which govern it, and we see it incessantly described as a danger or a threat.
The partition of the Polish kingdom is nearly a hundred years old. But it will not allow the three powers that accomplished it to be at peace. Even now it demands great efforts to establish it as just and right. It is not enough that they have caused the history of the world to be written as if all the blame were on the side of this old Poland. It is not enough that what among other people is counted as virtue or duty—love of one's country, its memories and language, hatred for its enemies and detractors—is branded and punished when professed by a Pole. It is not enough that no Polish deputy in the German or Galician parliament can escape swearing and protesting his faithful allegiance to the foreign power that shared in the partition, or that the youth of Poland are registered as soldiers in the German, Austrian, and Russian armies, are put into regiments where only a foreign language is spoken, and have to fight for foreign interests; more recently Russia and Germany ​have simultaneously initiated a persecution of the Polish nationality, which comes very near to abuse.
At the beginning of this year, after a few days' warning, Prince Bismarck drove out of Prussia fifty thousand Poles, men, women, and children, helpless creatures who had to seek a shelter or perish. His political motive seems to be twofold. He is afraid of the Polonicising of the German-speaking parts of the country; for it appears that the Polish language, in spite of everything that is done to root it out, continually gains ground. And he would like to secure the best possible conditions in a forthcoming war, and have as few hostile elements in the country as he can. He is not only driving out of Prussia all foreign Poles, even if they have long been settled there—and this so rigorously, that on the 1st of February a woman ninety-one years old arrived in Warsaw, who was exiled from Posen as dangerous to the State—but he is also proposing measures that will make the ownership of the soil as burdensome as possible to the Prussian Poles who reside in Posen and possess land there. He wishes to buy out the Poles from their old land, and has asked for 300,000,000 marks towards colonisation, just as if some region either uninhabited or inhabited by savages were in question. And it is not even to be permitted to every German to buy Polish land unconditionally; no one who has married a Polish woman can get permission; for experience teaches, says Bismarck, that such a wife makes her husband a Polish patriot in the twinkling of an eye. In future no Prussian Pole is to be allowed to settle in Posen, unless he has married a German wife; for only in this event can there be any hope of Germanising him and his children.