Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/16

We have now ascertained one very definite object towards which German organisation in Poland has been directed. A nation of seventy millions, being strong in arms but short of food, strips a country of twelve millions, which has fallen under its military domination, and leaves those twelve million people to starve. The German argues in his heart: "We want this food and are strong enough to seize it. The owners cannot prevent us. They are not Germans. Let them take care of themselves." That is one aspect of German policy. It is a callous and criminal spoliation on a gigantic scale—the fruit of that corporate egotism which Prussian politics have erected into a creed. It would be execrable enough if it were the whole, but it is not the whole. There has been another purpose in the background that is viler still. If the German Administration had confined itself to draining Poland of its food, no one could have approved the act, yet a charitable onlooker might have assumed that Germany was led to it by her own necessity, and not by any active malevolence towards those Polish victims who happened to be starved as a result. This "crime of necessity," however, was unfortunately the means of usurious profit to the agents employed in carrying it out. We have already mentioned the "Import Co., Ltd.'s," 140 per cent., and the example was so dazzling that the authorities were inevitably tempted to extend the monopoly of grain to other articles of staple consumption in the "organised" territory. On December 1st, 1915, the Imperial German Administration in Russian Poland