The anti-Polish policy of Prussia, although occasionally criti cized in the Reichstag, had, on the whole, both a majority of German opinion and the authority of the supreme power in the Reich behind it. But it was largely rendered futile by the disci plined organization of the entire Polish element, as well as by its large and continuous increase in numbers. While the German birth-rate began to fall rapidly, the birth-rate among Polish peas ants remained very high ; and the political struggle for the land in Prussian Poland resulted in a measure of agricultural prosperity which—in spite of drastic expulsions of foreign subjects, inaugur ated by Bismarck in 1885—continued to attract immigrants from other parts of Poland. Prussian Poland shared in the material progress of Germany after 187o, and the World War found this province the most advanced and uniformly wealthy of all the three sections of Poland.
Even after all the losses and privations which the province, however out of sympathy with the German cause, had to undergo with the rest of Germany in 1914-18, the Prussian sector of Poland, when it shook off German domination shortly after the Armistice (Dec. 27, 1918), emerged as still the most prosperous of the three; its territory had not been devastated by actual war fare, as large portions both of Austrian and Russian Poland had. This gave the former Prussian Poles a certain advantage over the others; and they naturally clung to this advantage in the new and united Polish republic after the Peace of Versailles. A customs barrier continued, for a time, to separate the former Prussian province from the body of the new Poland; and a special "Minis try for former Prussian Poland" came into being, which existed for several years.
Such separatism was grounded on a somewhat distinct mentality which the struggle against Prussian rule had developed. The Poles
under Prussia had acquired something of that crude belief in sheer force which was characteristic of Germany after 187o. They had not had the opportunities for intellectual refinement which home rule under Austria had given to their Galician brethren; but their peasantry had reached a much higher level of enlightenment than that of either Austrian or Russian Poland. In the new Polish State, in consequence of all this, the former Prussian province represented a solid block of hard-and-fast Nationalism as well as of uncompromising devotion to the Catholic Church, whose serv ices to the national cause in Prussian times were gratefully re membered. Gradually, however, the ties of common political life began to produce their effect, and the parliamentary elections of March, 1928, found the population of former Prussian Poland differentiated politically on the same party lines as the rest of the republic. The new Polish University of Poznan (which had taken the place of a German Academy), and other Polish educational and cultural institutions, worked for amalgamation; and it was no longer in any spirit of separatism that the city of Poznan under took to organize a large national exhibition, to be held on the loth anniversary of Poland's regained independence, in 1929.