The address of the previous speaker also referred to vicissitudes and changes.  These changes have characterized our entire Polish policy, from 1815 till today.  They took place whenever high Polish families gained influence at court.  You all know the Radziwill family and its influence at the court of Frederick William IV.  If we could make a mental test of the popular feeling of 1831 and of today, we should find that the conviction has greatly increased that we have German fellow-countrymen in the Grand duchy of Posen.  The former and, I am tempted to say, childish cult of the Poles as I knew it in my childhood is no longer possible.  Then we were taught Polish songs in our music lessons together with the Marseillaise, to be sure.  The Polish nobleman, therefore, than whom God never created anything more reactionary, was here thrown into one pot with the French revolution, and liberalism was coupled with the cause of the Poles, because we were lacking in political perspicacity.  Such feelings were ingrained in our citizens at that time.  I am thinking especially of the citizens of Berlin.  If today you ask the opinion of your forty-eight million fellow-countrymen, and compare their views and those of the bulk of the German army with the bugbear which had found lodging in German hearts at the time of Platen’s Polish songs, you surely cannot despair of further development.  We may, you must agree, register progress, although it is slow and there are lapses.  It is like climbing a sandy hill or walking in the lava of Mount Vesuvius.  One often glides back, but on the whole one is advancing.  Your position will grow the stronger the more vigorously developed our sense of nationality will become.  I ask of you, do not despair if there are clouds in the sky, especially in this rainy year which has saddened the farmers.  They will disappear, and the union of the Warthe and the Vistula with Germany is irrefragable.

For centuries we have existed without Alsace-Lorraine, but no one yet has dared to think of what our existence would be if today a new kingdom of Poland were founded.  Formerly it was a passive power.  Today it would be an active enemy supported by the rest of Europe.  As long as it would not have gained possession of Danzig, Thorn, and West Prussia, and I know not what else the excitable Polish mind might crave, it would always be the ally of our enemies.  It indicates, therefore, insufficient political skill or political ignorance if we rely in any way on the Polish nobles for the safety of our eastern frontier, or if we think that we can win them to fight anywhere for German possessions, sword in hand.  This is an Utopian idea.  The only thing which we and you, gentlemen, can do under present conditions, and which we can learn from the Poles, is to cling to one another.  The Poles, too, have parties, and used to show this even more unfortunately than we, but all their parties disappear as soon as a national question is broached.  I wish the same would come