Norwich bulletin., 1919-06-05
IN THE DAYS NEWS
Posen.

The province of Posen, in Eastern Prussia, to which Poland has been seeking to strengthen her claim by military occupation, is described ifi the following bulletin from the Ma tjonal Geographic society.
 "Posen was the unhappy expert ment station for some of Prussia's most vigorous and futile efforts t; Germanize an alien population.
 dunptff- Nor
 Until the northern portion of Posen fell to Prussia, after the first partition of Poland in 1772. and the 21 years later, Posen's history was blended with that of Poland. In connection with the first partition, it will be recalled that Frederick the Great adopted the ingenious scheme of surrounding those parts of Poland he desired with a military force, or | the preteXt that he was seeking to check the spread of a, cattle disease | "Gnesen, early capital of Posen i 30 miles to the nartheast of the city of Posen, was the residence of Bole- salus, so long as that restive war 1 rior remained ot his capital. There in the year 1000, the Polish prince lavishly entertained Otto III, 'so-
 
 Otto conferred upon -Bolesalus the royal crown and made Gnesen a seat of an archbishop. For more than 300 years Polish kings were crowned there.
 After being banded about for a brief period, Posen fell to Prussia again in 1915 and for m<re than half a century Germany paid little heed to it.
 After the division of the vast es- tates and other economic changes. Pol 1 ish middle classes in Posen began to prosper, Whereupon, toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century Prussia began to take notice of it's provincial 'Topsy.' Germans had been immigrating there since the thirteenth century and the newcomers, at first were welcomed. Severance of Poser from Poland changed that feeling through open friction was not general T ed until Prussia began her oppressive } measures.
 Polish nobles had kept alive Pol ish traditions but Prussia was more alarmed by the prosperity of the Poles
 than by what, today, might be called the nobles' propaganda. So she SC about Germanizing Posen. both by
 colonization and by compulsion, mucf as she attempted to do to the Frencl in Alsace.
 "Prussias first move was to mak,
 German the language of the schools , Police were ordered to disperse meet , ings where Polish was spoken.
 After sixteen years that program failed 10 make much of a Prussian i'm
 pression upon Posen, so a commission was set up, in 1884, to buy land iron the Poles for German settlement. Be fore the failure of this policy wa 5 openly admitted the original appropri ation of 100,000,000 marks was supple l mented again and again until, in if
 teen years more than half of Pose1
 had been bought German colonists
 Still the Poles predominated Nor 2 kept coming from Poland and opposi
 tion to the German program was in
 tensified as the measures becam
 harsher.
 z when, in 1902, it was brought to ligh l in the Prussian parliament that pu n pills had been whipped by the whole 0 sale for declining to say the Lord e Prayer in German. But the oppositio = of the grownups did not cause tn
 worldwide interest aroused by tn
 school children's srike in 1906 whe {. about 100000 Polish pupils took tha f means of protesting against bein beaten when they would not answe r, questions in German. The Prussia II government refused to accede to tn
 request of the archbishop of Pose