As far, at least, as outward appearances go, there was nothing particularly oppressive about the new rule. Civilians were not permitted on the streets after midnight, but those with any legitimate excuse for night-hawking were granted special passes. The Poles showed a tendency to meet half-way their next-door neighbor and late oppressor. With the exception of a few “_Polen-fresser_,” German residents were not driven out, as in Metz and Strassburg. Boche merchants continued to do business at the old stand. Newspapers published in Germany were refused admittance, but that was a fair retaliation for similar action by the new authorities of the late Empire. Even the detested statues were not overthrown until March, when the Germans declined to give the Poles port facilities at Danzig. The language of the schools, as well as of government offices, was changed to Polish; but as soon as Berlin consented to a reciprocal arrangement, German was restored to the curriculum, though it was taught only a few hours a week, as a foreign tongue. In short, the conditions of Bromberg had been nicely reversed in Poznan. It must, to be sure, have been rather a tough life for the town braggart who had always espoused the German cause; but there was apparently nothing to be feared by those who know how to hold their tongues and confine their attention to their own affairs—and the German is a past-master at lying low when it is to his interest to do so. His native tongue was almost never heard on the streets, such arrogance as existed was confined now to the Poles, and the just-let-us-alone-and-we’ll-be-good rôle had been assumed by the Teutons.
There were suggestions, however, that the Poles were not yet adepts at governing, nor likely soon to establish a modern Utopia. Already they had succeeded in encumbering themselves with fully as much red-tape as the French. A musician as national leader and rallying-point seemed to be in keeping with the Polish temperament. There was a lack of practical directness in their methods, a tendency toward the erratic, at the expense of orderly progress. One of their foremost business men turned high official, to whom I applied for a signature and the imprint of a government stamp, received me with a protest that he was “too busy to breathe”—and spent two hours reciting Polish poetry to me and demonstrating how he had succeeded in photographing every secret document that had reached Posen during the war without being once suspected by the Germans. “I am not experienced in this business of government,” he apologized, when I succeeded at last in taking my leave, “but I am ready to sacrifice myself and all I have to the new Poland.”