The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 | Page 9

the various
parts, to forget for the time all quarrels and grievances.
This showed itself in the most natural and inevitable way with the Poles,
of whose national culture Germanism is the sworn foe. The well-known
manifesto of the Commander in Chief did not awake this feeling among
the Poles of Russia, but simply met it and gave it support. Equally

natural and elemental was the patriotic outburst that spread among the
Jews of Russia. In their case the political and social Radicalism which
we always find in the Jews turned by some sound instinct against
German militarism, which had shown itself the chief cause and
occasion of a world catastrophe.
The German declaration of war on Russia at once dispersed all doubts
and hesitations in the many millions of the population of the Russian
Empire. Some may put in the forefront of this war the struggle with the
uncivilizing militarism of Prussia. Others may see in it, above all things,
a struggle for the national principle and for the inured rights of
nationalities--Serbians, Poles, and Belgians. Others, again, see in the
war the only means of securing the peaceful future of Russia and her
allies from the extravagant pretensions of Germany. But all alike feel
that this war is a great, popular, liberating work, which starts a new
epoch in the history of the world. Thus the war against united Germany
and Austria-Hungary has become in Russia a truly national war. That is
the enormous difference between it and the war with Japan, whose
political grounds and objects, apart from self-defense against a hostile
attack, were alien to the public conscience.
There is one other consideration which cannot be passed over in silence.
In Russia many are convinced, and others instinctively feel, that a
victorious war will contribute to the internal recovery and regeneration
of the State. Many barriers have already fallen, national and political
feuds have been softened, new conditions are being created for the
mutual relations of the people and the Government. There is every
reason to think that some members of the Government--unfortunately,
it is true, not all--have understood that at the present time of complete
national union many of the old methods of administration and all the
old Government psychology are not only out of place, but simply
impossible. In one question, the Polish, this conviction has received the
supreme sanction of the sovereign and of the Commander in Chief, and
a striking expression in the latter's manifesto to the Poles. Further than
this, the actual attitude of Russian Liberals and Radicals toward a
whole series of problems and relations cannot fail to be changed. Thus
the war will help to reconcile and soften many internal contradictions

in Russia.
How far we are, with this state of public opinion and these perspectives
of the internal development of Russia, from those fantastic pictures of
civil disunion and revolutionary conflagration which were anticipated
before the war and have sometimes been, even since the war, portrayed
in the German and Austro-Hungarian press! Our enemies counted on
these domestic divisions, and they have made a bitter mistake.
Constitutional Russia, precisely because of the radical internal
transformation which it has experienced in the period that began with
the Japanese war, has proved to be fully equal to the immense universal
and national task that has devolved upon it. The national and political
consciousness of Russia not only has not weakened, but has
wonderfully strengthened and taken shape. As one who has had a close
and constant share in the struggle for the Russian Constitution, I can
only note with the greatest satisfaction the striking result of Russia's
entry into the number of constitutional States, a result which has so
plainly showed itself in the tremendous part that Russia is playing in
the great world-crisis of 1914.

Prince Trubetskoi's Appeal to Russians to Help the Polish Victims of
War
[Russkia Vedomosti, No. 231, Oct. 8, (21,) 1914, P. 2.]
A new era of Russian-Polish relations has begun, and the noble
initiative of A.J. Konovalov, who has donated 10,000 rubles for the
needs of the war victims of Poland, offers a shining testimony.
Up to the present the Polish people have had relations with official
Russia only. The war has brought them for the first time into immediate
touch with the Russian people. Thousands of Polish exiles have gone
forth to our central provinces. In Moscow alone there are not less than
1,000 former inhabitants of Kalisz, to say nothing of fleeing people
from other provinces. Moscow, of course, attracts the largest number of
these unfortunates. Some particular instinctive faith draws the Poles to

Moscow, to the centre of popular Russia. To my query why she had
chosen Moscow among all Russian cities, a poor Polish woman, the
wife of a reservist, said:
"I