THE POLISH LAND 51have second thoughts. The once tempting idea that geographical conditions in
the Polish lands nurtured Democracy as surely as Muscovy nurtured Autocracy
does not find support in detailed research.
At all events, great caution is necessary. It is all too easy, having refined the
constituent factors of political geography, to pretend that they represent the ele-
ments of a mathematical sum. They do not. They provide the variable con-
stituents of social and economic life which in turn forms no more than the
material for the exercise of human will and the making of arbitrary decisions.
Political affairs are conducted by men whose perception of the objective reali-
ties of their predicament is rarely confident and never exact, and who are free to
ignore them or defy them as they choose. In Poland's case at every turning-point,
- in 1385, 1569, 1683, 1717, 1794-5, 1918, or 1944 - decisions were taken or
avoided which could have been different, and which could have led to different
results. The Polish state, like every other political organism, was created not by
predetermined forces, but by men. Its collapse in the eighteenth century was no
more inevitable than its resurrections in the twentieth. Its future is no more
ascertained than that of any other country. Geography, in fact, as 'the science of
our revolving earth', describes little more than the potter's wheel. Man is both
the Potter, and the Clay; and it is Man, not Geography, that is the villain.