The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-11-28

German people, overstrained by war and starvation, broke, and the working men of Germany took control of the nations policy, wrestling that control from the hands of the army. Within a few days the revolutionary movement reached the old cathedral city of , Magdeburg on the Elbe. Now in Magdeburg was prison, famous prison used commonly for danger ous and important political of- lenders. For more than a year there had been detained in this prison a well-known and exceed ingly dangerous Polish patriot. The moment news of the revolu- ton reached Magdeburg, that famous Pole was released. As quickly as automobiles and special trains could accomplish it he was spirited across the eastern plain of Germany and into the border province of his native Poland. On the morning of the 11th he reach- ed Warsaw. Wild enthusiasm greeted his coming and he was made at once the Supreme Oom- mander of the Polish armies. The Germans who controlled the pup pet state they had created two years before prepared a nasty exit: Poland's Independence Day had dawned. As one historian puts it, 'The Man and the Hour had come" For the Man was Joseph Pilsudski.
 Superhuman
 The demands which the Hour placed on the Man were superhu- man. Neither Joseph Pilsudski nor any other would have dared ac- cept the burden of 1918 without a well-reasoned. ardently cherished philosophy: Pilsudski's philosophy was simple formula Tn the world of nature there are planets that are burning out and there are suns that are rising. So in the history of mankind there is the same phenomenon: peoples that have burned themselves out, and others that are like suns rising to power. Long before 1913 Pilsudski had made this formula the guid- ing principle of his life, for he believed that Poland, though once a burned-out moon, was now ready to rise like the morning sun.
 But what devastation lay before the men who with Pilsudski twen- ty years ago faced the task of re- storing Poland to state hood: In l930 when I toured Poland with a . party of agricultural experts anG heard Polish agriculturists proudly tell their colleagues from abroad of the fine strains of cattle and horses and pigs and chickens that had been introduced since the war, I began to realize dinly just how enormous the job of restora- tion was: cattle and horses, pigs pigs and chickens hardly existed in the land, for war had allowed the gravest of 'all crimes against nature to be committed, the des- truction, as farmers put it, of the seed corn.
 Enormous Damage
 Then in 1883 when I visited the most eastern portion of Poland, where trenches still scar the land- scape, began to comprehend the enormity of the property damage which New Poland had to repair. Railroad stations all down, rail- roads running the way armies had wished them to run but not in harmony with the demands of new state, buildings battered and often gaping with holes what a picture 1t must have presented in 1918! One ruin, which there had not then been time nor money to repair, still haunts my mind: a great bridge over the River Dniester, one end of it destroyed so that the remainder hung like stump over the rushing river.
 Besides such physical problems as these New Poland had to suf- fer a period of constitutional ad- justment that reminds us of what the American people had to go through from the end of the Rev. olution to the adoption of the COhEti titution. Sectional prejudices threatened to wreck the effofts of the colnprp rpIaisers itl Warsaw as