SIR, —Your warning against the hasty assumption that the Polish question
is settled is most salutary. The deadlock which has been removed was merely a deadlock between the " Big Three." To the ordinary observer it is plain that the Government they have imposed on Poland is (in spite of M. Mikolajczyk), one dominated by Russia, a Power, that is, whose action ever since 1939 has been (save for one brief moment) uniformly hostile to the existence of a free and independent Poland.
As you say, whether such a Government can claim any authority will be put to the test if elections are fairly held. Would it not have been better, in view of the strongly supported rumours about the state of things in occupied Poland, to defer recognition till the character and results of the elections were known? This indecent haste must suggest that the object of the deadlock was, on the one side to get rid of a tiresome problem, and on the other to destroy that focus of Polish independence, the London Government, which cannot be regarded as extreme " Right," unless we include under that term men whose views would be as various as those of Mr. Churchill, Sir Archibald Sinclair and Mr. Attlee (and the Editor of The Spectator), though like them at one in a common love of their country and determination to defend it. Moscow's recent denunciation of Senor Madariaga as a " Fascist " would seem to throw a light here.
The treatment of Poland, tragic initself, has ,a wider significance. It is a symbol of the system which has been set up at San Francisco in which the refusal to a weaker power of any rights against a stronger is the foundation stone. As Dr. Gilbert Murray says in his illuminating article, "From Covenant to Charter," it is one thing to recognise that this often happens, it is another to lay down injustice as a law and to call wrong right. Is this unrepresentative Lublin-rooted Government to be the type of treatment meted out by Russia to her neighbours in Eastern and central Europe, where, as Dr. Murray points out, Russia insists on having her hands free? If so, how far is the neighbourhood to extend,—to the Spree or the Rhine, to the Mediterranean or the North Sea? Is this the road to peace?
It is some comfort to a Briton that the toughest opposition to the con- secration of power-domination at San Francisco came from two British nations, Australia and Canada.—Yours obediently,
Previous page
